Geometric dotwork thigh tattoo of a hot air balloon, a sailing ship and a whale, with teal and red accents on black linework.

Hot air balloon, ship and whale on a thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A large tattoo on the outer thigh shows a hot air balloon above a sailing ship with full sails, with a whale beneath the hull. Geometric triangles, a circle with a lattice pattern and a starry black panel frame the scene. Fine linework and stippled dotwork shade the balloon, sails and water, with black fills and small teal and red blocks of colour.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon had been sold to Hester Vane as a prize at the Harwich regatta, a patched silk thing the colour of old plums, and she hung it from the rafters of the chart room because nobody else would buy it. Her father called it foolishness. He called most things foolishness that could not be measured with brass dividers, so the balloon stayed, swaying whenever the door opened, while the Mary Alder was readied for the Greenland run.

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Everyone on the quay knew the Mary Alder had no business chasing right whales that season. The ice had come early, and the old men said the fish had gone deep. Hester had drawn the chart herself, all ruled circles and triangles, the sea laid out as a lattice of sounding lines. Where two lines crossed, she had marked a point she could not explain to anyone, a place where the water seemed to bend back on itself.

They raised the whale on the ninth morning, a grey back under the hull so vast the ship seemed to float on it. The harpooner swore. Hester did not look at the water. She looked up at the balloon she had insisted on carrying aboard in its crate, and she cut the lashings with her knife. The silk filled with the stove's breath and rose slowly past the mainmast, and the whale turned beneath them as if it had been waiting for a sum to come out right.

Her father never forgave the sea for taking the balloon, nor the ship for coming home without its boat. But every spring after, a chart arrived at the harbour office with a small dotted circle in the corner, and beside it, in her neat hand, a single line: the whale went under and the sky held.

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