Black fine line tattoo of a paper aeroplane with a dashed trail looping behind it, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paper aeroplane with dashed trail on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a simple outlined paper aeroplane in flight, with a dashed line curving up and around in a loop from the left. The linework is thin and even, in solid black ink with no shading. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo centred on smooth skin and a thin strap running across the top left of the frame.

Fine line Back Dashed line Loop Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ailsa had folded the paper twice wrong before she got it right, and by the time the wind caught the nose of the plane off the pier at Scarra, it was the best thing anyone had made on the island that spring. Her grandfather said planes didn't loop. He said it while mending a creel, not looking up, and she decided that was a challenge.

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She had folded it from the back page of the ferry timetable, the one with half the crossings crossed out in biro because of the weather. Every sailing on it was a maybe. The plane went out low over the water, dipped towards the kelp, then climbed in a slow curl over the rocks where the seals hauled out, and came round again as if it had remembered something it meant to say.

Her mother had gone across on the Tuesday boat to the hospital in Kirkwall and had texted only one word that morning: wind? Ailsa had replied with a photo of the sea and a row of full stops, which her mother would understand to mean yes, and also that she was fine, and also that she was not going to say anything else about it.

On Thursday the boat came in late, rolling in the swell, and her mother came down the ramp with her bag over one shoulder, scanning the pier. Ailsa held up the timetable. On the back, in pencil, she had drawn the plane and the loop it had made, and a dashed line running from the harbour wall all the way to the edge of the page. Her mother studied it the way you study a map of somewhere you have been before, and then she laughed and held out her arms.