Colourful hot air balloon tattoo with mandala patterns and the word freedom in black script on the thigh.

Hot air balloon and freedom script on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A hot air balloon with ornate mandala-style panels in teal, pink, orange and green hangs from a single black line. The word freedom is written in black script along the line, with a loop at the bottom. The photograph is taken outdoors with a blurred figure in the background, and the tattoo fills the frame.

Neo-trad Lettering Thigh Hot air balloon Freedom Script Mandala Balloon String

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boats of Skerrow went out before the light that October, eleven of them, and the women stood on the harbour wall with their shawls pulled tight. Tam Gillies, who mended nets in the loft above the fish market, was the first to see the balloon come down over the headland. It was painted teal and rose and orange, with lace-work panels like a doily left out in the weather, and it hung from a single black line that trailed through the spray. The line had words written along it in careful ink, and the minister's wife, who had been to the town school, read them aloud. It said freedom, and then it looped back on itself at the bottom as though it could not quite stop.

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The balloon fouled the mast of the Morag and would not come loose. Tam climbed out along the boom with a gutting knife in his teeth and cut the line where it crossed the rigging, and the balloon lifted straight off the deck like a held breath let go. The men shouted for it to be caught. The children ran along the quay. Nobody caught it.

For three nights after, the boats came home empty, and the nets came up with nothing but weed. On the fourth night Tam found a black thread caught in his own net, looped and knotted, with a single word still legible where the salt had not reached it. He went down to the water at slack tide and unpicked it, strand by strand.

The fleet sailed the next morning with full holds. Tam stood on the wall and watched the sun catch on a thread of black line high over the headland, going east, and he lifted his hand to it the way a man does to a neighbour leaving town for good.