Fine line tattoo of a paper boat and paper plane outlines with blue watercolour splashes on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paper boat and watercolour splash on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a tattoo on the inner forearm showing an outlined paper boat and a small paper plane, joined by thin black lines that cross the design. Soft blue watercolour washes and splatters surround the boat and run down below it. The black linework is fine and crisp, and the blue ink gives the composition a loose, painterly feel against the pale skin.

Fine line Forearm Paper boat Paper plane Origami Watercolour splash Arrow

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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

The rain had been coming down the Calder for three days when Ada Pell found the paper boat snagged in the reeds below the mill race. It was folded the old way, with a sharp prow and a flat keel, and someone had written a word along its side in pencil that the water had blurred to grey. She turned it over on her palm. Blue dye had bled out of the paper into the creases, spreading like a map of a country she had never visited.

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Her brother Tom had folded them every summer on the wall by the lock, sending them out toward the weir while their mother shouted from the window. He was sixteen and could make a plane that flew the length of the lock gates. Last autumn he had gone down to the coast to work the fishing boats, and he had not written since. A week after the boat, she found the plane itself, caught on the sluice grille with one wing torn and bound in black thread, as if someone had tried to keep it straight.

She walked the towpath to the estuary with both in her coat pocket. Mr Garside, who kept the lock and had kept it for forty years, said the river always runs down to the sea whether you send things after it or not. At the mudflats she knelt, set the boat on the tide, and watched it turn slowly in the slack water, the blue running out of its hull in soft clouds. She kept the plane. The thread was still tight on its wing when she pinned it to the kitchen wall that night, facing the window.