Colourful traditional-style tattoo sleeve on an upper arm showing a sunburst, a rose and a hot air balloon.

Sun, rose and hot air balloon sleeve

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A woman wearing a grey T-shirt with a black mermaid silhouette shows a colourful tattoo sleeve on her upper arm. The sleeve includes a rayed sun, a red rose with green leaves and a hot air balloon, with bold outlines and flat fills. Bright reds, yellows, blues and greens dominate against the pale skin, and the arm fills the left side of the frame.

Traditional Upper arm Sun Sunburst Rose Hot air balloon

Find an artist for this

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

Rain had been coming sideways through the covered market for three weeks, pooling under the stall where I kept the tin signs and the boxes of postcards nobody wanted. My hands smelled of vinegar from cleaning the enamel. Nobody browsed in weather like this, so when the lad in the yellow anorak stopped in front of my trestle and stared at a faded lemonade advert, bright as a fever dream, I thought he was after shelter more than a purchase.

Keep reading

"Is that real?" he asked. "The colours, I mean. Mum says they don't make them like that anymore."

"They don't," I said. "Everything's grey now, even the fruit."

He asked whether I had anything that flew. I said no, but I had my uncle Ray's flash book in a shoebox under the till. Ray painted balloons for the summer fairs and tattooed the odd sailor on the side, and his sheets were the loudest things I owned: a rayed sun with a cheeky face, a red rose the size of a fist, a balloon striped orange and cream drifting over green hills. I'd kept them for years because throwing them out felt like admitting he was gone.

I lifted the sheets out carefully, the paper gone soft as cloth. The boy's mum called him from the pavement, but he didn't move. He just kept his finger on the balloon. "How much?" I told him to take it, and that if he ever found a wall worth putting it on, he should send me a photo. When the rain finally thinned at four o'clock, a slant of gold came in under the market roof and lit the empty corner of the trestle where the sheets had been. I left it there a minute before I packed up.