Fine line hot air balloon tattoo with pink, orange and blue watercolour splashes on the side of a person's ribs, with sunflowers in the background.

Hot air balloon with watercolour splashes on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A hot air balloon with a basket and rigging is drawn in thin black linework on the side of a torso, beneath a raised arm. Soft watercolour-style splashes of pink, orange, blue, teal and purple fill the envelope and spill out around the design. The balloon sits centrally against smooth skin, with a sunlit green and yellow sunflower background.

Fine line Ribs Hot air balloon Balloon Basket Watercolour splash Sunflower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The silk was still warm from the gas when Mab Thorne decided the balloon needed colour. Her uncle Silas had painted the envelope plain cream for twenty years, saying paint cracked when the air went thin, and he was asleep in the cart with his boots on. Mab took the jars of dye left over from the bunting, pink from the Easter stalls and a tin of teal meant for the chapel shutters, and flicked the brushes until the cream looked like a sky after rain.

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By the Michaelmas fair the whole of Eastwick had climbed the hill to watch. The rigging creaked, the burner roared, and the basket rose with Mab and the carpenter's boy, Tom Aske, who had paid her a penny to be let aboard. Below them the sunflowers in Widow Gale's garden turned their heads like a crowd following a parade.

The wind came off the moor sideways and carried them east over the stubble. Where the paint had dried stiff it flaked, and the flakes fell like confetti on the sheep, the chapel roof and the mill pond. Farmers stood in their fields and shaded their eyes at a sky that seemed to be dripping.

They came down at dusk in a bean field nine miles off, the basket tipped and the silk hanging in the hedge like a wet sock. Silas found them there by lantern light with a face like thunder, which lasted only until he saw the colour still on the bean leaves. He kept the envelope that winter, and every spring after he added one splash more.