Black and grey hot air balloon tattoo with a gondola carrying two figures and a propeller, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloon and gondola on upper arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large hot air balloon with a netted basket and fine vertical panel lines fills the upper part of the design. Below it hangs a small boat-like gondola holding two seated figures, a propeller and a chimney, with faint clouds and birds drifting around them. The work uses dense hatching and etched linework in shades of grey and black, giving it a vintage engraved feel, and the composition wraps across the upper arm.

Upper arm Hot air balloon Figure Cloud Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off Skerra has been pushing the gulls backwards since dawn, and still Mr Hallam insists the envelope will hold. You stand on the shingle with the rope cold through your gloves while he checks the valve for the third time, tapping the silk like a doctor sounding a chest. Behind you the island's three hundred souls crowd the harbour wall, half of them sure the balloon will drop into the sea and the other half hoping it will.

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He wants a passenger who weighs nothing and can read a compass. You are the only one on Skerra who has never been seasick, so you climb into the wicker gondola beside him, the brass propeller ticking on its shaft and the little tin chimney of the stove breathing smoke at your knees. The island falls away in a rush of slate roofs and washing lines. Below, the water turns from green to pewter, and a flock of shearwaters rises to watch you go, as if they have been paid to escort you.

By noon the propeller has seized and the wind has turned, carrying you north towards the bare rocks of the Stacks. Hallam burns the last of the paraffin to coax the envelope higher, and for a while you drift above a bank of cloud so thick you could walk on it. He says nothing. He takes a pencil from his waistcoat, draws the island in the margin of his logbook, every chimney in its place, and hands the page to you without a word.

When the cloud breaks, the Stacks are beneath you and the boats from Skerra are already pushing out, oars flashing like a shoal of small fish. Hallam says they will talk about this for a hundred years. You fold the drawing into your coat and keep your hand on it, a little map of the only place you have ever called home, and you do not look down until the rocks have slid past.