Fine line black and grey tattoo of a hot air balloon with leaf scallops, stars and an arrow on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloon with leaves on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A hot air balloon fills the upper part of the design, with its envelope decorated with scalloped leaves and striped shading, and a flame sits in the basket below. Thin ropes link the envelope to a patterned basket, and a small arrow, stars and tapered tassels surround it. The linework is fine and mostly black, with grey shading inside the envelope and a few darker areas, set against plain skin on the outer thigh.

Fine line Botanical Thigh Hot air balloon Leaves Star Arrow Flame Basket Rope Tassel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the tray, it's still hot, and don't touch the dough while I'm talking, the proving won't forgive you. Right, where was I. Ah, Ada Crowther and her balloon. She was twelve the winter she sewed the first one from my old flour sacks, stitched together with waxed thread and stuffed with every sycamore leaf she could scrape off the lane. Her father swept the floor around her and said nothing, which in our family was the same as blessing a thing.

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She wanted to rise over the Calder valley like the fair's painted balloon she'd seen once through the bakery window. So she built a basket from woven willow and hung it under the envelope with ropes she'd knotted herself, then she begged a coal from the oven, kept it burning in an iron pan, and fixed it under the mouth of the cloth. On the morning of the Harvest Fair the wind came down off the tops, cold and smelling of peat, and the whole thing lifted off the cobbles like it had been waiting all its life to be asked.

She didn't go far. Two fields, a stone wall and a cow that looked up in disgust. But the sky was the colour of rising dough, and the leaves on the envelope caught the light like tiny gold tassels, and she shouted down that she could see the bakery roof, the chimney, her father's flour-white hands raised in the doorway. Then the coal guttered, the cloth sagged, and she came down softly in the hay beside the cow, laughing so hard she hiccupped.

Her father carried the basket home over his shoulder. Ada never flew again, not properly. She became the best baker on the street instead, and every Sunday she stitched a little leaf onto the crust of the bread before it went in, just so the oven would remember what it had once carried. There. The loaves are ready. Mind, they're hot.