Watercolour-style hot air balloon tattoo in green, yellow, orange and pink with black linework and swirls on a person's side ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour hot air balloon on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A hot air balloon with a striped green, yellow and orange canopy hangs from a thin black tether that runs down the skin. Soft blue, pink and orange washes spread behind the balloon, with fine black swirls beside it. The colour is loose and painterly, while the outlines and rope are crisp and dark, and the design sits centrally on the side of the torso.

Ribs Hot air balloon Watercolour Swirl Rope Sky

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The balloon was the colour of boiled sweets when the schoolmaster's boy first saw it rise over the Tuesday market, and nobody in Carrow Hill believed a thing could float on so little. Ada Penhallow had stitched it from a dead gentleman's silk curtains and heated it with a stove she had carried up the church tower herself. She tied its tether to the iron railings by the chapel gate, because the vicar said a tether needed a fixed point, and she only listened to vicars when it suited her.

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The boy was Tom Fennick, and he was given the job of holding the rope while she filled the canopy. Each afternoon the stripes swelled a little more, green, then yellow, then the orange of a peeled satsuma, and the blue sky behind ran into the pink of the rooks going home. Ada talked the whole time. She talked about the wind on the moor, about a man called Lusk who had once drifted to Wales in his nightshirt, and about the curls of cloud she said were only the air remembering where it had been.

In October the rope went slack in Tom's hands. The canopy lifted a yard, then two, and Ada laughed from the basket with her hat clutched in one fist. He held on until the rope burned his palms, then let it run through them, because a boy should learn early when a thing belongs to the sky. Nobody in the village saw her come down. In the morning they found the tether cut clean and hanging from the railings like a dropped line of ink.

Tom kept a length of it, and every market day he tied it back to the gate. When the wind came off the moor he gave the rope one firm tug, the way you knock on a door you suspect might still be opened from the other side.