Fine line black tattoo of an origami paper boat, origami bird and paper plane with a dashed flight path, on the inner wrist and forearm.

Origami boat, bird and paper plane on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Three geometric origami-style shapes, a paper boat, a folded bird and a paper aeroplane, are drawn in black linework on pale skin, with a dotted trail rising from the bird towards the plane. The lines are thin and even, with faceted panels shown by inner lines rather than shading. The image is a close crop on the inner wrist against a plain white background, with the design sitting neatly on the forearm.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Origami Paper boat Paper plane Bird Dashed line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, lad, because this one is about paper, and paper wants a warm hand. Our Nell was nine the winter the Hollin Bank roof came down, and she sat on the back step with a sheet torn from the Co-op ledger, folding the way her gran had taught her. A boat first, for the brook behind the rows. Then a bird, because her mam said a bird was what you made when you wanted something to come home.

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The third she made for the pit. Nell had watched the cage drop and rise all her life, and she knew no letter could go down that shaft. So she folded a plane, sharp at the nose, and carried it up the bank where the wind came off the spoil heap. She didn't throw it. She let it go with the flat of her palm, the way you'd loose a sparrow, and it slid over the winding wheel and came to rest in the grass by the lamp room, nose down, as if it had been listening.

Her dad rubbed a stone in his pocket when he was thinking, and he rubbed it hard that week. On the Friday the cage came up with the men grey as ash, and he walked straight to the lamp room and picked up the plane. Pencilled along its wing, in her careful capitals, was a line of dots running from the bird's beak up to the tail. He followed it home with his cap in his hand.

The bird is still in the drawer at number nine, folded soft as cloth, and the boat sits beside it with its keel gone. Nobody has ever flown a plane out of that pit, but every spring the children try, and the dotted line still shows on the kitchen table where Nell pressed her pencil to find her way.