Traditional-style flash design of a hot air balloon with red roses, a swallow and the words TIME FOR AN ADVENTURE, printed on a black shower curtain.

Hot air balloon flash on a shower curtain

Traditional · Colour · Flash

The image shows a shower curtain printed with a traditional-style flash design, set in a bathroom. The central hot air balloon has red roses, cream banners reading TIME FOR and AN ADVENTURE, and a swallow and star motifs on a black background. The bold black outlines, flat red and turquoise fills and cream highlights give it a classic flash look, with the balloon centred and the other motifs spaced around it.

Traditional Hot air balloon Rose Swallow Banner Star Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon came over the top of Wrynose at twenty past six, so low that I could read the lettering on its banner from the lay-by. My brother said it was a stunt for a holiday brochure. Ruth said nobody paid for a balloon that colour, red and cream and turquoise striped like a boiled sweet, and that the man in the basket was far too calm for someone who had just lost his ground crew in a bog.

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He had lost them, it turned out, to a ewe that wandered onto the flight path, then to a gate. He leaned over the rim with a flask in one hand and a coil of rope in the other and asked if any of us had hands that didn't shake. Ruth said hers shook at the best of times. I took the rope. Dad, who had driven the Land Rover up the single-track road with the hazard lights on for no reason, wedged the bumper against a boulder and hooked the line to the tow ring.

The basket dropped a few feet, then sailed off the edge of the pass, and for a minute I was out on the wet grass in my wellies with the rope burning my palms, the wind full of swallows dipping under the cloud. Ruth ran alongside shouting directions nobody needed. The balloon lifted, its roses bobbing as if they wanted a look at the valley, and the rope went slack in my hands.

I stood there holding nothing. Dad came over and put a hand on my shoulder. "Well," he said, reading the banner as it slid away towards Eskdale, "it did say adventure." Ruth laughed until she had to sit on the wall. We drove home with the windows down and the heater off, and I still have the rope, coiled in the boot, because nobody ever came back for it.