Traditional colour tattoo of hot air balloons decorated with floral patterns and pink flowers on the upper leg of a person seated in a car.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hot air balloons and flowers on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The photograph shows a thigh with two hot air balloons, one large and patterned with a diamond motif and the other smaller with roses, joined by thin lines and a cluster of pink flowers. The outlines are bold and the fills are solid, with red, pink, yellow, grey and green used in bright, saturated areas. The tattoo fills the right side of the frame, while another person's tattooed hand and arm rest across the leg against a car interior.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Pearl Cottrell sewed the last diamond onto Harlequin the week her father stopped climbing the ladder to the loft, and by the August fete the whole of Saltby Green knew that patchwork of red, grey and yellow better than they knew the church clock. Her father had said a balloon was only as steady as what it was tied to. He meant the men on the ropes, and he meant the little rose balloon, Tansy, that she had made over one winter from his old offcuts and the wrong thread.

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On the Saturday the wind came in off the marsh sideways. The crew held the tethers taut while children threw paper flowers from the basket, and a boy in a blue cagoule let go of the wrong line. Tansy lifted off the grass with a hiss of gas, her basket trailing pink petals, and Harlequin strained against her own ropes, sixty feet of canvas wanting to follow.

Pearl did not shout for the crew. She took the knife from her apron pocket and cut Harlequin loose, because the big balloon had the lift to catch the smaller one, and because her father had taught her that you never let two things you have made fly apart. They climbed together over the church tower, diamonds dimming, roses turning gold in the low sun, and came down an hour later in Mr Pargeter's barley field, tangled at the crown like two old friends who had forgotten what they were arguing about.

That evening Pearl pressed a single paper petal into her father's sewing manual, at the page where he had written in pencil: keep them tied.

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