Black fine line tattoo on a forearm of a paper plane with a dashed flight path looping beneath it and the words Act on your impulse running along the path.

Paper plane and dashed flight path on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo on the inner forearm shows an outlined paper plane at the top, with a dashed line curling down and across the arm like a flight path. The words Act on your impulse follow the curve of the dashed loops in a clean serif typeface. The linework is thin and crisp, with no shading, set against a dark patterned fabric background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo had folded the same plane for forty years, and she was not going to let a boy from the amusement arcade tell her it was wrong. "Crease it again," she said, tapping the sheet of ruled paper on the pier rail. "Properly this time, with your thumbnail, not your nerves."

Keep reading

The boy, Tomasz, was eleven and had been sent down from the arcade with a ten-pound note and orders to come back with something that would fly past the lifeguard hut. He creased. A gull on the railings watched him do it with the same flat look Mrs Okonedo gave the tea urn. Behind them the tide was going out over the sand in long grey tongues, and somewhere a radio was playing a song about a lighthouse.

She launched the plane for him with a low sideways flick. It dipped, caught a gust off the harbour wall, and climbed. Tomasz followed it with his whole body, the way you follow a kite string, until it was a speck above the breakwater and then nothing at all.

"Where's it gone?" he said.

"Where you sent it," said Mrs Okonedo, and went back to her folding, because a woman in a yellow hat wanted one for her husband's hospital bed, and some folds could not be hurried.

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