Fine line black hot air balloon tattoo with a small pennant on the inner forearm, above the wrist.

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 with a scalloped canopy, a flag on top and a woven basket hangs below, all drawn in thin black linework. The shading is minimal, with light hatching on the basket and envelope, and the design is set against plain pale skin. The arm is shown from the elbow to the hand against a dark background, with a red polka dot sleeve at the top of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Hot air balloon Balloon Basket Flag

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The scallops on the canopy were the last thing Nell sewed, and the first thing Mr Haskett checked. He held the silk up to the grey light over the rec ground and squinted along the seams. "Twice as tight as the last lad's," he said, which from him was nearly a medal. Behind them the headstocks of Scarrow Colliery stood against the hill, and the spoil heap beside them had been greened over by three summers of grass that nobody had asked for.

Keep reading

The basket was woven from willow cut on the riverbank, and Nell had spent the wet fortnight on its rim, tying off each cross-strand with waxed thread so it would bear the weight of a grown man. Her father, on the early shift, came home each morning with coal dust in the creases of his neck and asked whether the thing would really go up. "Wind's wrong," he said on the last Saturday. "Comes off the spoil and sits on the field like a dog."

On the Sunday the pennant on the crown of the envelope stood out straight towards the pit, then hung limp, then swung round to the west. Mr Haskett lit the burner and the fabric filled with a sound like someone shaking out washing. When the bell rang the end of the afternoon shift, the basket lifted off the grass with four boys hanging on its ropes, and then with nobody at all. Nell watched it climb past the winding wheel.

From the top of the headstocks it was small enough to cover with her thumb. She could see Scarrow Row, the chapel roof, the black stripe of the beck, and her own kitchen window with the light left on. The flag pointed at none of it. It pointed west, past the last pit wall, towards a country nobody in the village had ever had cause to visit.