Small colour tattoo of a hot air balloon with a blue, yellow, orange and red gradient on the calf, with thin black outlines.

Hot air balloon on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A small hot air balloon with a basket hangs in the centre of the frame, with thin dark outlines and a gradient fill running from teal-blue at the top through yellow and orange to red near the base. Faint dash marks above and beside the balloon suggest motion. The tattoo sits on the outer calf of a leg with rolled denim jeans above and a red flip-flop at the bottom right, against a dark, softly lit background.

Traditional Calf Hot air balloon Balloon Basket

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon came over the breakwater before the gulls had finished their argument, low and slow, its basket swinging a metre above the masts. You stood on the slipway with a bucket of mackerel still dripping from one hand, and you watched it drift towards the harbour mouth like something that had forgotten where it was meant to be.

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Nobody in Sennick had seen one since the summer the chapel roof blew off and the vicar blamed the regatta. Dilys Penrose, who ran the chandlery and had never once been up in anything, leaned over the wicker rim with a fistful of scarf and a look of enormous concentration. The teal top of the envelope had faded to a pale green over the years, though the yellow and orange bands still caught the light, and the burner hissed like a kettle left on too long. Someone on the quay shouted that it was a sunset that had run away from home.

Dilys threw you the end of a rope. 'Hold that and don't let go for anything,' she called, and you did, feet braced on the wet stone while the envelope tugged and shivered above you. The wind off the water turned sharp, the way it always does by the lighthouse, and for a moment the whole town seemed to tilt beneath you.

She brought it down in the car park behind the fish market, the basket grinding over cobbles, and climbed out with her scarf askew and her face split open with laughter. Afterwards the harbour was full of dropped colour. A thin film of rainbow lay on the puddles where the burner's fuel had spilled, and you stood in it, watching the bands of red and gold slide across the water until the tide came in and took them out to sea.