Black linework drawing of an ornate vintage hot air balloon with a small bird, shown as a flash design on aged paper with pink and teal balloons behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vintage hot air balloon designs on aged paper

Fine line · Mixed · Flash

The main subject is an ornate hot air balloon with a latticed envelope, draped fabric bands, a basket and a small flying bird, drawn in fine black linework. Two smaller balloons sit behind it in pink and teal, with a similar structure and lighter, more delicate lines. The sheets are photographed at a slight angle on aged, cream-coloured paper, with the front drawing in sharpest focus and the background designs softened.

Fine line Hot air balloon Bird Basket Drapery

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

The envelope was patched in three places with sailcloth when we bought it from a widow in Bristol, and Mr Haskett swore it would lift a grand piano if the wind was honest. It was not honest. For four days after we lost the tide off Lundy the balloon hung over the Atlantic like a wet cabbage, its basket bumping the swell, while I sat in the wicker with the logbook open on my knee and wrote down nothing but the bird.

Keep reading

The bird was a small brown thing with a white throat. It came aboard on the second morning, walked the rim of the basket as if it had paid for the ride, and sat on the drapery bands where the silk had gone the colour of weak tea. Haskett wanted to shoo it. I told him a thing that has travelled further than we have deserves a seat. He grumbled, then fed it crumbs from his biscuit tin, and by the fourth day it was the only one of us who looked rested.

On the fifth morning a westerly came up under us so suddenly the bird had to hop onto my wrist to keep its balance. We rose through a bank of mist and out into a sky so clean it hurt, and below us the sea had turned the grey-green of old bottle glass, with a coastline of cliffs I did not recognise. I opened the logbook at last and wrote the date, then the word Land, then stopped, because the bird had already flown down to it, and I thought that was the only entry that mattered.