Sailing ship, hot air balloon and waves on upper arm
Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo
The sleeve shows a sailing ship with full sails and rigging on the lower arm, and a hot air balloon with a Take Me Home banner above, with small geometric crystal shapes and dotted lines between them. Waves with curled crests wrap the lower part of the arm beneath the balloon. The linework is bold and clean, with dotwork and soft grey shading in the sails, balloon and water, and the design is entirely black and grey. Two photographs show the same arm from different angles against a dark background.
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
You are halfway up the stairwell of Dunmore House when the wind finds the broken pane on the thirteenth landing and starts to hum, a low note like someone blowing across a bottle. The lift has been out since Tuesday. You carry the shoebox of your grandad's postcards under one arm, the ones with ships on them, the ones he swore he would never post because the stamps cost more than the sentiment.
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On the top floor the roof door is propped open with a breeze block. Outside, the estate lies grey and damp, the football pitch a sheet of puddles, and over the far car park a balloon is rising slowly, its basket swinging, a banner trailing from the rigging. Someone on the eleventh floor has been painting the words on it for the whole street to read, and they are big enough to see from the bus stop: TAKE ME HOME. Nobody in Dunmore House has ever been taken anywhere by a balloon. Your grandad used to say the sea was the only honest wind, and he would know, he crewed the Cuxhaven ferry for thirty years before his knees gave out.
You open the box on the parapet. A barque with every sail set. A herring boat with its nets hung out to dry. Harbour lights at Boston, blurred by a thumb. On the back of each, in his square capitals, a single sentence, and in one corner a small folded diamond of paper, the kind he taught you to make on wet afternoons. You pin one under a stone. The balloon dips over the car park, too heavy to land and too stubborn to leave, and then it lifts again.
You take out the last card, the one with no ship on it, only a curl of wave, and write your own address on the back. The wind takes it from your fingers before you have finished. It skates out over the bins and the pitch and the roofs of the cars, heading for a sea you cannot see from here, and for once you do not need to know where it will land.
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