Colour tattoo of a pink and yellow striped hot air balloon with a small basket on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Striped hot air balloon on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A hot air balloon with pink and yellow horizontal stripes and dark shading along one side is outlined in black ink. A small yellow basket hangs from a thin rope at the bottom, with a curled tail-like line trailing beneath it. The balloon fills the upper frame on bare skin along the ribs, with a soft, slightly warm-toned photo.

Ribs Hot air balloon Balloon Basket Stripe Rope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Day forty of the long drift, and the north wind has finally gone round, so the Ely children will get their seed tins after all. I am writing this sitting on the basket rim with my boots over the side, which Tobiah says is the only sensible way to keep a pen steady at four hundred feet.

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The Saffron Mab has never looked prettier. We patched her crown with sailcloth from the old shop bunting Mam hoarded in the loft of the drowned chapel, so the pink and the faded yellow still show the ghost of lettering where the stripes run over it. Tobiah says she looks like a boiled sweet that has learned to fly. He is not wrong, though I will not tell him so before the winter.

Yesterday the rope caught on the sluice gates at Welney. Tobiah swore and went down the line hand over hand while I held the burner valve, and when the knot finally gave, the tins went down in a chain of small clinks and the basket dropped a yard, then swung back. Its tail of spare cord curled out behind us in the wind like a question nobody wanted to answer. We had lost two tins and nearly the whole burner. I cut nothing. I stood there with my heart going like a drum and watched the cord loop and settle.

Now the drift is steady, the sun is low, and the Saffron Mab is heavy enough to drop us onto the Ely shingle by dusk. I can see the cathedral tower ahead, a grey finger against the orange. When we land I will hand the children their tins one by one, and they will think the balloon is the best thing that has ever come down out of the sky.