Traditional style colour tattoo of a striped hot air balloon with draped bunting and clouds on a lower leg, shown in a two-panel close-up.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloon on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A large hot air balloon sits at the centre of the design, with a red and yellow striped envelope, green bands dotted with white, and yellow swagged drapery. A black outline frames the balloon, with curled clouds around it, a basket and rigging lines below, and a red pennant on top. The two-panel photograph is a close-up against a red plastic-wrapped background, showing bold black outlines and solid colour fills.

Traditional Calf Hot air balloon Balloon Cloud Basket Drapery

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon man came to Sandling Bay the summer the boarding house lost its roof in a gale, and he asked for nothing but a bed in the attic and a pot of tea in the mornings. Mrs Pryce took him in because the guests were already grumbling about the damp. He unrolled his bundle on the kitchen table, a great striped envelope of red and yellow silk with green bands dotted white, and he stitched yellow swags of drapery along its hem while the kettle sat cold beside him.

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Every evening he walked down to the shingle and looked north over the water. "Heat is a stubborn thing," he told Nell, Mrs Pryce's girl, who carried his supper up the stairs. "It wants to leave the ground, so you must give it somewhere to go." Nell asked where the basket was. He said it was waiting in the harbour under a tarpaulin, its rigging coiled like sleeping eels.

On the last Saturday of August the whole village gathered on the sand. Bunting ran from the lifeboat house to the pier. The balloon man lit the burner, the envelope swelled and lifted, its red pennant snapping at the top, and smoke curled round its belly like wool. Nell stood at the edge of the crowd with the mooring rope in her hands, because nobody else would take it. When the basket swung free she felt the pull in her palms and let go.

The balloon went north over the headland and was not seen again. Mrs Pryce hung the attic key on its nail and said the man had paid his way in the end. Nell kept a scrap of the bunting in a drawer. Each August, when the tide was right, she walked to the end of the pier and waited for the sky to fill with striped silk, and sometimes, she said, it did.