Back of two lower legs with black and grey blackwork tattoos on the calves, one showing a rising sun over hills and a tower, the other a striped hot air balloon above clouds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sun and hot air balloon on both calves

Blackwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the backs of two lower legs, with a tattoo on each calf below the knee. The left leg has a rising sun with radiating lines, a tall tower or spire and layered hills, while the right leg has a striped hot air balloon above a row of clouds and a block-like skyline. The work uses bold solid black areas, fine hatched lines and open white shapes on a dark background, and the two designs mirror each other across the legs.

Blackwork Geometric Calf Sun Hot air balloon Tower Cloud Hill Skyline Landscape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon came down in our Discovery rows on the last Saturday of August, when the windfalls were already soft in the grass and the wasps had found them before we did. My father heard it before he saw it, a roar like a kettle the size of a chapel, and then the striped envelope slid over the ridge with its basket dragging a line of cut hedge behind it.

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The pilot was a woman called Ines Harrow with a sunburnt nose and a map folded to the size of a tea towel. She had lifted off at dawn from the common past the water tower and had been chasing the sun all morning, she said, because the sun was the only thing she trusted to point north. She wanted to know which way lay the spire of St Aldric's. My father pointed at the grain silo, the only tall thing for miles, and she laughed so hard she had to sit down in the basket.

We filled her a flask of cold tea and she handed me her goggles to hold. Over the hills the clouds were stacking up like unwashed linen, and she said that from up there the orchard looked like a page of fine hatching, every tree a single black line. I asked her if she had ever come down on purpose. She said the trick was never to come down on purpose.

When the wind turned she rose again before the dew had gone, and I stood among the Bramleys holding her goggles until the balloon was a stripe, then a dot, then only the sun where it had been. My father folded her map in four and kept it in the tractor. Some Septembers I still take it out and hold the hills up against it.