Top-down outline of an airplane with ornamental filigree inside, set against purple radiating rays, tattooed on the outer thigh.

Airplane with purple rays on a thigh

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A top-down airplane sits at the centre of the design, outlined in dark blue-black linework with scrolling floral filigree filling the wings and fuselage. Fine purple rays fan out behind the aircraft to form a starburst. The image is a close crop of a thigh, with the tattoo's colour mainly in the purple rays and the darker outline.

Upper arm Airplane Aeroplane Ray Starburst Filigree Floral Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The hall smelled of floor polish and warm sausage rolls, and Gary Pilling was still flicking the cap of a biro across the trestle table the way he had in Year Nine. Nobody had worn a name badge for long before someone asked about Owen Ferris, and then the table went quiet in the way it used to when Mr Hollis asked a question nobody had revised for.

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Owen had drawn aeroplanes from above. He said that from up there nobody could tell you were frightened. He copied the scrolls from his gran's crocheted table runners and filled the wings and the long fuselage with them until his maths book looked like a church window. When the teachers confiscated the drawings he drew them again on the inside of his arm. The rays were his particular vanity. He fanned them out behind every plane with a purple gel pen nicked from the stationery cupboard, the only pen in the school that never ran dry.

"He's not coming," Gary said, and pushed a folded programme across the table. Inside, in biro, someone had written Owen's name followed by a question mark. I took a purple pen from my handbag, the same make, I was almost sure, and drew a plane on the back of a paper napkin. It was small and seen from above, with a starburst of lines around it. My hand was steadier than I expected.

Gary unfolded the napkin and laughed through his nose. "That's a proper Owen." Then he took the pen, added a little curl to one wing, and passed it on. The purple went round the room from hand to hand until the napkin was soft at the folds and the caterers were stacking chairs around us in the last of the light through the high windows.