Fine line black tattoo of a paper aeroplane with a dotted trail looping into a heart above script lettering on the inner forearm.

Paper aeroplane and dotted trail on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine line tattoo of a paper aeroplane sits on the inner forearm, with a dotted trail curving back from it into a loop shaped like a heart. Short script lettering runs along the trail, but it is too small to read clearly at this image size. The ink is solid black on a light background of pale fabric, with gold bangles visible at the top right.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Heart Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boy on the far side of the wire had a good arm, I'll give him that. Every Tuesday at ten past seven, before the lorries started queuing, a paper aeroplane would come over the fence and skid across the concrete at my feet. I kept them in a biscuit tin under the booth, flattened and dated, because the rule at Harrowell Crossing said nothing handed over the counter could go unlogged, and I had decided long ago that paper was no threat to anyone.

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The first ones were blank. The fourth had a row of pencil dots running from the nose of the plane back round in a curve that closed on itself, like an O pressed flat. Words ran along the trail, too small to make out without my glasses, which I left in the booth on purpose. I learned to read them slowly, one dot at a time, the way you learn a language you were never meant to speak.

In March the planes stopped. I stood at the window each morning with my tea going cold, watching the strip of grass beyond the fence where nothing landed. On the eleventh day a lorry driver needed a stamp, and while I was bent over his form something tapped the glass above the counter. It was folded tighter than the others, the paper gone soft at the edges. I unfolded it with two fingers and found the dots had run all the way to the margin, pressed so hard the pencil had torn the sheet.

I wrote back that night on the reverse of a customs notice, the only blank paper I had. I weighted the nose with a paperclip and at first light threw it as far as my arm would reach. A gust caught it, turned it once above the wire, and let it drop into a patch of wet clover on the other side. Somewhere a small boy was already running towards it, and I stood at the window until he was out of sight.