Collage of four tattoos: a traditional hot air balloon with roses on the upper back, a colourful traditional anchor with rope and hearts on the upper arm, a black and grey anchor with a compass and

Four nautical and balloon tattoos collage

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

This collage shows four separate tattoo photographs. The top left shows a striped hot air balloon decorated with pink roses and small birds, placed on the upper back, and the top right shows a bold traditional anchor wrapped in rope with two hearts, in red, pink, teal and yellow. The bottom left shows a shaded black and grey anchor overlaid on a compass rose with a red ship's wheel on the forearm, and the bottom right shows a fine-lined sailing ship in grey on the upper arm.

Traditional Back Upper arm Forearm Hot air balloon Rose Flower Bird Cloud Anchor Rope Heart Compass Ship wheel Sailing ship Sea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

"Forty years," Mick Harrow said across the trestle table at the Spa Hall reunion, pointing his pint at me like a ship's wheel he meant to spin, "and you still owe me a balloon."

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I had promised him one in the summer of 1986, when we were both fourteen and certain the wind would carry us past Filey. We cut an envelope from Sandra Pyke's dad's old canvas tarpaulin, painted roses on it in her mum's kitchen with a tin of enamel, and made a basket from a bread crate. The burner was borrowed from a caravan site. The plan died on the bike shed roof, where the canvas snagged a gull's hook and tore clean in two.

Mick never forgot. He reached into his jacket and unfolded a beer mat, drawn on in biro with a compass rose and a little ship's wheel in the corner. "Trawlers now," he said. "Dogger Bank to the Faroes, every fourteen days. Not a balloon, but I did get the wheel."

I told him I had kept the length of rope we used as a tether, coiled in a biscuit tin under my bed for thirty years. He laughed so hard the barman looked over. Then the DJ played Dire Straits, the old crowd spilled onto the parquet, and Mick hauled me up by both wrists. For one song the whole room seemed to lift a little off the floor, the way a thing does when somebody has finally cast off the line.