Black and grey fine line tattoo of a paper aeroplane with a dotted loop trail, placed on the back of the neck near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paper aeroplane with dotted trail on the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a person seen from behind, with dark hair pulled up and loose strands falling over the neck. A small fine line tattoo of a paper aeroplane sits low on the neck, with a dotted trail curling away from it. The soft grey lighting and plain background keep the focus on the delicate linework.

Fine line Neck Dotted line Hair Neck

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Oswald Peel, records clerk at the Calder Valley council offices, folded rejected planning applications into aeroplanes at lunchtime and flew them off the footbridge over the weir. Before each launch he pencilled a row of tiny dots on the back of the paper, so that, as he put it, refused things would at least know where they were going.

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One wet Thursday in October, a plane came down on the towpath at the feet of Marion Hale, who was tearing up stale bread for the ducks. Her name was on the front in his fussy copperplate, beneath the words Refused: glasshouse extension, Ladder Lane. She had applied for it twenty-two years ago, when her husband Frank still grew tomatoes in a shed that leaked. She smoothed out the wings, read the note twice, and followed the pencilled dots with her finger back up the steps toward the bridge.

Oswald was leaning on the railing with a pencil behind his ear, looking like a man caught at something. "It was refused," he said, before she could speak. "Yes," said Marion. "I know. Frank's gone and the tomatoes went with him, but I still want the glass." She took a biro from her coat and, under his dots, wrote: Approved. Signed, the woman who still wants it. Then she folded the plane again, badly, and threw it over the rail.

It wobbled over the weir, dipped once, and pointed itself downstream towards the offices, where somebody on Monday morning would have to unfold it and read the new trail.