Black and grey fine line tattoo of a paper aeroplane on the upper back, just below the shoulder blade.

Small paper plane on a shoulder blade

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A small, single paper aeroplane outline is tattooed on the upper back, close to the shoulder blade. The thin black linework shows the folds and wings in simple open outlines, with no shading. The photograph is black and white, with the tattoo placed off-centre against plain skin and a dark top.

Fine line Geometric Back Paper plane Aeroplane Outline

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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

Sit down, sit down, you're letting the cold in. The tent's always draughty by October, the canvas has given up trying to keep anything out. See that patch on the centre pole? Swindon, that was. Right. You want the one about the paper planes, the one Mr Pelling swore on his mother's grave was true.

Keep reading

The Halloran Brothers Circus had nine wagons left and one elephant called Duchess, who would only eat marrowfat peas. In the last winter of the act, the flyer, a girl called Ines Moss, couldn't sleep, so she sat up on the rigging folding paper from the old bills nobody was going to read anymore. Every night, a plane. She'd send them down into the sawdust and the clowns would chase them round the ring. The ringmaster told her to stop wasting the posters. She said the posters were wasted already.

One night a plane caught the draught from the open flap. It sailed clean over the top of the big top, past the generator, out over the field where the lorries sat frosted in rows. Ines came down the rope quicker than she should have and stood in the wet grass with her hand over her mouth. She never found it. But in spring, a postman in Ludlow, so the story goes, found one pressed flat inside a library book about birds, folded from a bill for a show that had already left the county.

Ines kept folding them after that. She said a plane didn't need to land, it only needed someone to see it go. That's the bit I tell the children, and then they all want to run off and fold their homework. Go on, take one. Mind the tent pole.