Colour tattoo of an ornate hot air balloon with a trailing freedom script on the outer thigh, in a neo-traditional style.

Hot air balloon and freedom script on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A hot air balloon with an ornate patterned envelope in teal, orange, pink and green hangs above a looping black script that reads freedom, with its basket tied to the lettering by a thin line. The balloon uses bold outlines and dense decorative fills, while the script is drawn in a fine, even single line. The tattoo sits on the outer thigh against a blurred outdoor background.

Neo-trad Lettering Thigh Hot air balloon Freedom Script Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Pollard had sewn the gores for the Mendip Brothers' balloon since March. Teal, rust and a green like bottle glass, each panel scalloped along the seam, and across the crown a border of paisley that the order sheet had not asked for. Nobody at the works argued with her. They had seen her hands on the silk, and they knew better than to tell a woman who had been stitching since she was nine that the pattern was too fussy.

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On the morning of the Whitsun fête the balloon strained at its tether above the cricket field, and Teddy Fenn, the publican's boy, held the rope with both fists because he had been promised a turn in the basket and nobody had said when. The wicker knocked against his knees. Ada stood at the rope's edge with her thimble still in her apron pocket, the commission done, the knot not hers to undo.

The wind backed round at noon. The rope ran a yard through Teddy's palms, then two, and the balloon lifted with a sound like a sheet shaken out on a line. Men shouted and ran. Ada did not run. She had tied that bowline herself, the one her father taught her for hauling sails, and she watched it hold at the basket ring while the rope burned through the boy's grip and the whole bright thing swung out over the hedges toward the Downs.

A fortnight later a postcard came to the works, smudged with what might have been jam. The picture showed a hawthorn bent flat by the west wind. On the back, in pencil, Teddy had written that the basket came down in a Wiltshire field, the envelope caught in a hedge like a bunting flag, and that the rope was still tied where it had been. He had signed it Ta, Mrs Pollard, and underneath, sideways, went where it wanted.