Colour traditional tattoo of a striped hot air balloon with grey clouds and a basket on the forearm, outlined in bold black.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloon with clouds on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A striped hot air balloon with a black and red canopy band, scalloped trim and a small basket, surrounded by grey clouds, sits on the forearm. Bold black outlines frame the design, with solid fills in red, orange, yellow, teal and purple. Soft shading on the balloon and clouds gives some dimension, and the design is centred on a plain light background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The envelope was still damp from the dye vats when Ada Pellow carried it up the field at Hatherley, and she swore afterwards that the stripes had run in the rain like barley sugar. Nobody had told the Pellow Brothers' Travelling Ascent that the wind came off the Severn in such a temper that August. Ada had sewn every gore by lamplight for six weeks, red, ochre and a green like bottle glass, and she would not let the men touch the scalloped valance until she had finished it herself.

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On the Saturday the crowd stood three deep along the hedge, children on their fathers' shoulders and a brass band that could not agree on a key. Her son Tobias climbed into the wicker basket with a sack of sand for ballast and a tin of pear drops in his coat pocket. The burner roared. The balloon heaved, shrugged off its stakes and rose, slow as a held breath, over the church spire, trailing its bunting like a kite string for the village to catch.

Ada did not watch it go. She stood with her hands in her apron and counted stitches in her head, the way she did every night before sleep, because a seam you can count is a seam you can trust. Grey clouds drifted across the sun, soft as fleece off the shearing pens, and for a long while the balloon was only a small bright thing above the rooks.

It came down in a ploughed field nine miles west, the basket upright and the pear drops intact. Tobias walked back at dusk, grinning, with a single red strip of torn bunting he had cut free with his penknife. Ada took it, folded it twice and sewed it into the lining of the next envelope, where nobody would ever see it but the wind.

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