Fine line tattoo of a paper boat in a bottle with teal waves, a pink heart and the words LOVE TO TRAVEL on the upper thigh.

Paper boat in a bottle with lettering

Fine line · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A bottle with a paper boat inside sits at the centre, drawn in black outline with teal wave lines and a loose pink curl beneath. The words LOVE TO TRAVEL are written in teal capitals below the bottle, with a small pink heart beneath the text. The linework is thin and mostly unshaded, on a plain area of skin with the design filling the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Jessop had been folding the same boat for forty years, and she could do it blindfold on the Ramsgate ferry with a pint going flat beside her. Square of rough paper, two folds, the bow tucked under like a shirt cuff. Her brother Tom had taught her on the slipway the summer before he went to sea and didn't come back on the tide he promised.

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Every spring she wrote on the inside of a cigarette packet, rolled it tight, and pushed it through the neck of a green bottle from the Ship Inn cellar. Then she sealed the cork with candle wax and walked it down to the groyne at the turn of the tide. The bottles went out on the wind, a pinprick of teal glass bobbing toward France, and the gulls followed them as far as the buoy.

The one that came back arrived in March, nearly a year after she sent it. A man from Dover found it snagged in the weed under the harbour wall and carried it up to the pub because the cork had her name scratched into the wax. Inside was her own boat, sodden and grey, and under it a second note in a stranger's pencil: Thank you for the trip. Sending the boat back, it has been to Calais and Lisbon and one night, I think, to Iceland.

Nan sat with it a long time. Then she took a fresh packet from her apron, wrote LOVE TO TRAVEL across the back in capitals, and went down to the slipway to look for a bottle.

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