Black and grey hot air balloon tattoo with a ribbon and three birds, shaded with stippled dotwork, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloon on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A vintage-style hot air balloon with a quilted, stippled envelope, a decorative band with scalloped trim, and draped fringed bunting beneath the basket. A ribbon flows from the top of the balloon, and small birds sit in the sky on either side. The work is black and grey with fine line outlines, and the shading on the envelope is built from dots.

Dotwork Fine line Thigh Hot air balloon Ribbon Bird Basket Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bunting had gone up at six that morning, and Mrs Ada Pym was still picking pins from her cuffs when the envelope began to swell over the water meadow. Her husband had sewn the fringed swags himself, forty-two tassels of old curtain velvet, because he said a balloon ought to look as though it expected company. The silk had been dyed the colour of wet slate, and every quilted diamond had been stitched by hand in the fortnight before the fête.

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Captain Lowry, who had flown up from Bristol with a sack of sand ballast and no visible fear, checked the valve cord twice and then once more for luck. The boys from the vicarage held the ropes. Ada watched the ribbon at the crown lift and snap, the one thing she had insisted on, tied in a bow she had practised on a hatpin. Two small birds, swifts or sparrows, rose beside the basket as if they had been invited.

They went up at a quarter past two. By four the crowd was only a scatter of handkerchiefs and the balloon was a dark pearl above Hollis Wood. Then the wind turned and the ribbon tore free, streaming back over the basket like a flag surrendering. Ada saw it fall onto the spire at Stanmore, where it hung over the lychgate for three days. Nobody could reach it. The vicar wanted it cut down. Ada asked him to leave it be.

On the Sunday she walked out with a pair of kitchen scissors and a length of new blue ribbon in her apron pocket. The old bunting was still on the lychgate hook, faded to grey. She tied the new bow to the stub that remained and went home without looking up, which she decided was the only sensible way to be a woman who sewed for aeronauts.