Black and teal hot air balloon tattoo with mandala patterns, stars and a crescent moon on the upper arm, in a dotwork and geometric style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloon mandala on upper arm

Dotwork · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A hot air balloon fills the upper arm, with a mandala pattern in the envelope above a band of teal waves and a lace-like panel below, and a basket hanging from rope lines. Four-point stars and a crescent moon sit in the background above the balloon. The work is built from fine dots and detailed linework in black and grey, with teal used only for the waves.

Dotwork Geometric Upper arm Hot air balloon Mandala Wave Moon Star Basket Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down where the lamp can reach you, and mind the dog, he thinks every tale is about him. Now. The night the balloon came down on Skerrow, the moon was no more than a paring over the Kettle Rocks, and Mairi Ban was out on the machair with a storm lantern, because her man had gone to the far fank with the ewes and not come back by dark.

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She heard it before she saw it, a hiss like a kettle left boiling in an empty kirk. Then it came low over the water, a great pale bell of a thing, its belly painted all over with rings inside rings, flowers you could lose a thread in, and under them a band of green sea that moved as though the tide had been sewn into the cloth. Rope lines hung from it, singing in the wind, and beneath them a little wicker basket swung like a hook with nobody in it.

Mairi waded in to her knees and caught the nearest line. In the basket she found a brass compass, a tin of oatcakes, and a card tucked under the compass in careful handwriting that said only to tell the bay the writer had gone as high as the stars would let him. She towed the thing up the beach and sat with it until the sun came over the Kettle, and by then the envelope had gone quiet and cold as a shell.

So when the sky is clear and the moon is thin, you go out and look up, and if you see a pale light rising over the water with the stars stitched round it, you lift your hand. That is how she made the old ones believe her, and I have never once got the sign wrong.