Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a hot air balloon with a sun face on the calf, with clouds and a small figure in the basket.

Hot air balloon with sun face on a calf

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A hot air balloon fills the upper part of the leg, its envelope decorated with a sun whose face has eyes, a band of crosses and a row of chevron panels. Clouds surround the balloon, and a small figure with a telescope-like object stands in the basket below. The work uses fine linework combined with stippled dotwork shading in black ink only, shown in a black and white photograph against a plain wall.

Dotwork Traditional Calf Hot air balloon Sun Cloud Basket Figure Pattern Crosses

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The envelope had gone soft at the seams by the time Dessie Harrow hauled it out of the tent, and the sun painted on its crown still had both its eyes, though one had been touched up so many times it looked permanently surprised. Forty quid a ride, the board said, weather permitting, and the weather had not permitted since Tuesday. Dessie wanted to go up anyway. I told him the wind over the showground was coming off the sugar beet fields in gusts, and a balloon with a dodgy burner is just a very expensive way of being sick over Lincolnshire.

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He was already in the basket, leaning out with the brass telescope he'd nicked from a chandler's in Grimsby, pretending to sight the cloud banks. The band of crosses round the envelope had been done by a sign-writer called Mrs Oddy, who charged by the letter and never once asked what the thing was for. Chevrons ran beneath, like the roofs of a village seen from above. I had always thought they looked like folded hands.

Then the rope went slack in my fist and the whole field went quiet, the way it does before the generator cuts out. Dessie raised the telescope and said, "Ruth, there's a sun up there that isn't ours." I didn't look. You don't look at the sun through a glass unless you want to go blind, and I told him so. He laughed and said the sun had been watching him since he was a boy. The envelope gave a long sigh and lifted two feet off the grass, and the painted sun, I swear, shut one eye.