Fine line hot air balloon tattoo with small stars and dotted circles on the forearm, in black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloon on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small hot air balloon outline sits on the arm, with dotted circles and tiny star shapes scattered around it. The linework is thin and delicate, with the balloon's panels drawn in single lines and the dotted elements in a lighter, stippled style. The ink is black and grey against pale skin, set on a plain white background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Hot air balloon Star Circle Dotted line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hallam kept the good teapot for lodgers who paid in advance, and I was never one of them, so I learned to take my breakfast standing at the scullery window. That was where I first saw the balloon, a striped thing hanging over Saltmere Bay like a dropped plum, its basket no bigger than a bread bin.

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Nobody in the house believed it would come down on the sands. Mr Tuttle from room four said it was a weather kite, and the boy from the chip shop said it belonged to a man who had been a postman for forty years and had never once been allowed to fly. Both were wrong, and I found that out by walking down the shingle with a sandwich in my coat pocket and a pencil behind my ear.

The pilot was called Ruth Ambrose, seventy if she was a day, and she had drawn her route on the back of a tide table: a line of little dotted circles like stepping stones across the sky, each one a place she meant to pass over. She showed me the stars she had pricked in with a pin for the nights she could not see the coast. "You can navigate by what you already know," she said, and tipped the basket so I could climb in.

We drifted for twenty minutes, no more. Then the wind turned and set us down in a field of marram grass, and the sandwich had gone soft in my pocket. Ruth laughed until she had to sit on the rim. I still have the tide table, folded in my wallet, the dotted line running off its edge as if it never meant to stop.