Black fine line tattoo of a paper plane with a dotted loop trail, placed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Paper plane with dotted trail on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A single paper plane is drawn in thin black outline, with its folds shown as simple overlapping triangles. A dotted line curls out from its tail and loops once before ending at the top left of the frame. The ink is solid black on pale skin, shown in a greyscale photograph with the plane positioned low right and the trail sweeping upward across the back.

Fine line Back Paper plane Dotted line Loop Trail

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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 guests at Gull's Rest have gone down to the harbour for the lifeboat drill, and you have the top landing to yourself, which is how you like it. The window sticks in wet weather, so you wedge it open with a folded hymn sheet and sit on the sill with a pile of paper your mother says is spoiled. Its margins are full of tide tables and a laundry list from 1958, and you fold the lot into planes because folding keeps your hands from shaking.

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Your first attempt nose-dives into the sea wall. The second banks left over the chip shop and lands in the gutter. The third you launch with more care, a flat push from the sill, and it climbs past the drainpipe, turns a full circle over the car park where Mr Pollard is shouting at his dog, and then it's off again, out past the pier, the wind carrying it as if it has somewhere to be.

Later the landlady finds you on the stairs with ink on your fingers and asks what you've been doing. You tell her the planes were looking for the far side of the bay. She sits beside you, takes the last sheet from your lap, and reads the laundry list aloud, and her voice goes soft at a name you've never heard.

In the morning there's a plane on the sill that isn't yours, its folds crisp and its nose sharp enough to cut. Someone has written on the underside in careful capitals: TOO LOW FOR THE PIER. WAIT FOR THE TIDE. You keep it in your coat, and every morning after that you check the bay before you go down to breakfast.