Colour tattoo of hot air balloons among orange clouds with a postage stamp at the wrist, in a neo-traditional style on the forearm.

Hot air balloons and clouds on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm covered in a colour tattoo of hot air balloons drifting through clouds, with a small balloon above the elbow and a postage stamp near the wrist. The bold black outlines are filled with teal, red, yellow and orange, with soft shading on the clouds. The design wraps around the arm against a plain dark background.

Traditional Neo-trad Forearm Hot air balloon Cloud Sky Balloon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The envelope went up with the second ballast bag still tied to the basket, because nobody on the Holyhead field had thought to cut it loose. You watched it grow small over the grey water and felt the rope burn through your gloves. Mrs Pryce from the post office had licked the stamp herself that morning, a green one with a crescent moon and a star, and pressed it down with her thumb as if it might fly off without her.

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The wind out of the west was steady and kind, and by the second hour the coast had become a pencil line. The balloon was the colour of a boiled sweet, teal over striped red and cream, and the clouds came up to meet it like a flock of sheep that had lost their shepherd. Captain Ruddock sang hymns to keep the burner lit. You did the arithmetic in your head: fuel, height, the distance to the Wicklow hills. Each time the sum came out wrong, you looked down at the envelope in your coat and counted its corners instead.

Near the middle of the crossing the cloud broke open, and there was nothing below but a long bright shelf of sea. Ruddock laughed and said the Post Office had never once been so punctual. You understood then that the letter was not really going to Dublin. It was going to whoever had sent it, who would be standing on a quay somewhere, waiting for proof that anything could cross that much grey and still arrive.

The stamp was still on the envelope when the wicker hit the Dún Laoghaire field, and it was not even creased. Mrs Pryce would have been pleased. You were not sure yet what you would tell her.