Traditional colour tattoo of a red and white striped hot air balloon filled with three red roses and green leaves, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloon with roses on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A hot air balloon with red and white striped panels sits over a dark background filled with three red roses and olive green leaves. The balloon has a woven basket with gold rope rigging and red accents, outlined in bold black linework with solid, smooth colour fills. The design is centred on the outer thigh against a plain skin background with a patterned fabric edge at the top.

Traditional Thigh Hot air balloon Rose Leaves Basket Stripe Rigging

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The band at the Kestrel Ballroom has reached the third waltz before you finish stitching the last red panel, and Ezra Quill is leaning on the cloakroom hatch with his hat in his hands, asking whether the envelope will hold. You tell him it will hold if he stops fussing. Out in the yard the balloon lies folded like a great sleeping animal, cream and scarlet, and the paraffin smell from the burner drifts through the open fire door.

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He takes you onto the floor regardless. He dances the way he flies, carelessly and a little too close to the edge, and you let him steer you past the pillars where paper roses hang from the gallery rail. He talks about the three roses you painted on the basket lid this afternoon, how they will look from above when the sun comes up over the headland. You tell him nobody paints roses for a view nobody can see. He laughs and spins you under his arm.

At ten the band stops mid-bar and the esplanade doors are thrown wide. You climb into the wicker basket with the crowd calling after you, and the gold rigging sings taut as the cobbles fall away.

Below, the ballroom lights shrink to a single pale coin, and the waltz comes up through the open doors in fragments, the brass going thin, then gone. You hold the rim and watch the stripes of the envelope blot out the stars over the bay, and you think, not for the first time, that he was right about the roses.