Fine line black tattoo of a paper plane with a dotted flight path and cursive script on the side of the ribs.

Paper plane and script on the ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a fine line tattoo on the side of a torso, near the ribs, with lace underwear visible at the lower edge of the frame. A paper plane outline sits at the upper right, trailing a dotted line that curves down to cursive script at the left. The linework is thin and even with no shading, and the greyscale photo shows a clean, centred composition.

Fine line Ribs Paper plane Script Dotted line Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan Odile never let anybody finish a sentence in English if she could help it. At Temple Meads the 6.10 to Penzance stood with its doors open and Ruth's suitcase already on the rack, and still Nan was folding a sheet from her notepad, pressing her thumbs hard along each crease.

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"Allons," she said, which meant let's go. She had said it at every station of Ruth's childhood, though this time it was not a holiday.

The plane came out lopsided. Ruth told her so. Nan said paper did not care about symmetry, only about the wind and whoever let it go. She wrote a word on one wing in pencil, too small to read from the platform, and passed it through the window as the guard's whistle went.

Ruth did not unfold it until Taunton. Inside, in Nan's looping hand, there were no instructions, only a row of dots running off the edge of the page and a question: where do you think it lands? Ruth found a biro in her coat and drew the line on from the last dot, over the fields and the slate roofs, until the paper ran out.

Eleven years on, the plane still lay flat in a drawer in Leeds, the pencil word gone grey. Ruth had kept the dotted line, though, and she had never once stopped it at the edge of anything.