Close-up of a small solid black aeroplane silhouette tattoo on a forearm, held up against a vintage world map.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small aeroplane silhouette on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black silhouette of a passenger aeroplane, seen from above, sits on the forearm of a raised arm. The outline is crisp with flat, even fill and no shading or detail within the shape. The background is a sepia vintage world map showing the Americas, Africa and parts of Europe, which contrasts with the dark ink.

Forearm Aeroplane World map Travel

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the last week of August the Discovery trees along the lane are bowing under their weight, and you have stopped pretending the windfalls can wait. You walk the rows with a bucket on your hip while wasps squabble over the bruised ones in the grass. Overhead a jet drags its white seam east across the sky, and you do not look up, because your grandfather always said anyone who watches aeroplanes from an orchard is only hunting for an excuse to sit down.

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His atlas lives in the potting shed on a shelf above the twine. It is the sepia one with foxed corners, and he taught you to read it by tracing coastlines with a bramble stalk. Africa has split along a crease where the spine gave way. When you were nine you asked where apples had first come from, and he opened the book at the Caspian, laughed until he had to sit on the water butt, and told you the fruit had always been travelling, just more slowly than people.

Today a small black plane passes over the orchard, so low and sharp in its outline that its shadow slides across the rows before the sound arrives. You stop with a Cox in each hand. The shadow crosses the wasps, the ladder, the old greenhouse and the hedge, and in the time it takes you to set the fruit down it has crossed a county you have never seen and most of the map he kept pinned in his head.

You carry the bucket back to the shed. The atlas is open on the bench, and you put your thumb where the sea meets the margin, then go back out to the trees and keep picking, because the apples will not gather themselves and the aeroplane is already gone.