Black and grey fine line tattoo on an upper arm showing a palm tree over water, a crescent moon, a thought bubble reading CAN I LIVE, and several small icons.

Fine line icons and palm tree on upper arm

Fine line · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cluster of small, scattered fine line tattoos covers the upper arm, including a crescent moon with a bird, a thought bubble with the words CAN I LIVE, a heart, a paper plane, and a palm tree above a line of water. The linework is thin and sketchy, with some stippled shading on the moon and palm fronds. The image is entirely black and grey, and the arm fills most of the frame against a blurred background of stickers and shop fittings.

Fine line Upper arm Moon Bird Text Heart Palm tree Water Paper plane Hot air balloon Envelope

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The envelope had been opened so many times its flap had gone soft as cloth, and Mum kept it propped against the tea caddy where anyone could see the Canadian stamp. Lil never wrote proper letters. This one was a single sheet folded into a paper aeroplane, the wings creased flat, and it had come skidding across the back step the same morning the balloon went up over the recreation ground.

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She had always drawn her thoughts instead of saying them. At twelve she sat on the sea wall at Pellow Bay with a stub of pencil and sketched a cloud over her own head, then filled it with CAN I LIVE in capitals so square the vicar's wife asked if she'd copied them from a sign. Lil laughed about it. The crescent moon she drew over the harbour that summer looked like a tilted boat, and a gull sat on its horn as though it had been sent to keep watch on her.

I read the letter twice on the pier, where the wind kept lifting the pages. She had sent a postcard of a palm tree standing over a strip of silver water, which made no sense in a town where the nearest palm was a pot plant in the chemist's window. Under it she had written only, Sand is hot here and nobody asks me anything. I thought about that for a long while, then took a pencil out of my coat.

My reply was short. I told her the moon was still on the wall, that Mum had started setting a place for her on Sundays and then pretending she hadn't. I folded it into a plane the way Lil taught me, flicked it off the end of the pier, and watched it turn once over the water like a bird that had lost its way. Then the tide took it, gently and all at once.