Black and grey tattoo of a hot air balloon with a figure in the basket and hatched clouds, in an engraved line style, across the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloon with figure on back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a large hot air balloon with a ribbed canopy, a wicker basket holding a small figure, and a hatched cloud bank. Fine black outlines and cross-hatching create shading in an etched, vintage illustration style. The design is in black and grey and fills the upper back, with a curved horizon line along the bottom.

Back Hot air balloon Basket Figure Cloud Sky Horizon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Log of the balloon Halcyon Pell, third day out of Ostermark, wind from the north-west and holding. Mr Dorian Tusk is sulking in the basket because I would not let him carry the good brandy aloft. The canopy has been mended twice with bootlaces and still sighs like an old man each time we climb.

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At noon we rose through a bank of cloud so thick it hatched itself, grey upon grey, the way the engravers in the capital draw weather. Below us the horizon bent like a bow someone had dropped. I could see the Varn as a silver thread and, beyond it, the chimneys of the royal mint, where my sister is probably counting coins and thinking poorly of me.

The trouble began when the ballast ran low. Tusk pointed at the mail satchel, stamped with the king's seal, and I said no, it is the law. He said the law had never been up here. We argued the way men argue at altitude, too loudly and without reason, until the satchel was over the side, then in the cloud, then gone. The seal will have to explain itself to someone.

Tonight we came down in a turnip field near Holm. A boy with a sack of seed watched us land and asked whether we had lost something. I told him we had lost nothing, only dropped it, and that these are different things. He nodded as though this were wisdom, and I am writing it here so I remember he was right.