Fine line black tattoo of a small airplane with a dashed flight path looping down to a heart on the ankle of a bare foot, with a globe and atlas behind.

Airplane and dashed flight path on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A bare foot rests on a grey surface beside a globe, a world atlas and an old map. A small black airplane sits on the ankle, with a fine dashed line curving down the leg and ending in a loose heart shape on the top of the foot. The linework is thin and uniform in black ink, with no shading or colour, and the tattoo is the main focus of the framing.

Fine line Ankle Airplane Dashed line Heart Travel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The atlas came in the Tuesday post, wrapped in brown paper and tied with garden twine, so heavy the postman had to carry it to the counter in both arms. Nobody in Crowley Edge had ordered a world atlas. I knew, because I had sorted every parcel the village received since my father handed me the keys to the sorting hut, and the handwriting on the label was Tom Pyke's, who had left for the coast at seventeen and never written home.

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Inside the front cover someone had pencilled a line from Harrowden Wood to a city on the far side of the sea. It was dashed, the way a child draws a road she isn't sure of. At the far end, somebody had gone over the last few dashes in biro, looping them into a loose heart, the sort of shape you'd doodle on the back of a shopping list. Beneath it, in the same hand: Back by first frost, if the wood lets me.

The wood runs right up to the back wall of the hut, and in October the beeches drop onto the roof so the wind sounds like rain. I spent the afternoon with the atlas open on the bench, following the dashes with my finger the way you'd follow a path through trees you had only ever walked as far as the first bend. Overhead a plane drew a white thread across the sky, and I watched it until the thread blurred into cloud.

On Friday I wrote Not known at this address on a tag and tied it to the parcel, then took the path into the trees as far as the first bend. I stood there a while with the leaves coming down, and when I turned back, a silver shape went over the beeches, leaving its own faint line. I raised a hand to it, the way you do for the post.