Enlarged with AI from a smaller original
Watercolour hot air balloon on a forearm
Forearm · Colour · Photo
A hot air balloon with a wicker basket is drawn in loose sketched lines and filled with soft washes of pink, orange, yellow and blue. The washes bleed beyond the outline and spread into splashes around the basket, giving a painted watercolour effect. The balloon fills the right side of the frame on a pale forearm against a plain light background.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
Ottilie had the burner going before the sun cleared the ridge, the propane roaring into the envelope while the road below still held the cold. Dust lay in a skin across the highway out of Tonopah, and the only vehicle in sight was the pickup her uncle had left idling at the cattle grid, its headlights pale in the glare.
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Uncle Dell had painted the balloon himself the year after his wife died, using a tin of cheap watercolours from a petrol station in Barstow. He had never flown it. He only wanted to see the colours stretched tight over the nylon, rose and tangerine bleeding into a yellow that looked like weak tea, with blue pooling at the bottom where the paint had run. The basket was a real one, cut down from an old hamper, and it creaked when she set the crate of coffee flasks inside.
"Wind's coming off the flats," he said, standing at the guy rope with his hat pushed back. "Give it ten minutes."
She counted them out on her watch while the envelope swayed and lifted like something breathing. When the first gust hit, the blue wash at the base shivered and spilled onto the sand below, a cool stain spreading where the shadow of the balloon would fall.
"Then we go up," she said, and he laughed, because he had been waiting nine years for someone to say it.
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