Black and grey realism tattoo of a Spitfire fighter aeroplane with shaded wings and the number 130 on the fuselage, placed on the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Spitfire fighter plane on the ribs

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a Second World War style single-engined fighter aeroplane in three-quarter view, with a propeller at the front, a cockpit canopy and roundels on the wings and fuselage. Fine shading and soft grey tones give the metal surfaces volume, with darker edges and highlights along the wings and tail. The design sits diagonally across the side of the ribcage, and the bare skin and grey fabric at the top of the frame frame the image.

Realism Ribs Aeroplane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, all of you, and let the bread rise a while longer, because I am an old man and a wedding is the only place anyone lets me go on. This is about the summer the sky came down in Bert Pilling's hop field, when the number 130 landed on our Kentish grass with its propeller still turning slow as a clock.

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The pilot climbed out with his helmet under one arm and a face the colour of a loaf. Bert's wife brought him tea in a jam jar, because the cups were all at the chapel. He was called Tom Ferrier, a flight lieutenant from somewhere up north, and he kept looking at the roundels on his wings as if he had forgotten what they were for. The children crawled all over the fuselage. Nobody was hurt, and in those years that was reason enough to dance.

He stayed three days while the ground crew came with their lorries. Every morning he walked the rows of bines with Bert's daughter Ruth, who knew the hops by name and told him which ones smelled of rain. On the last morning he cut a single cone, pressed it into her palm, and said he would be back before the picking and would take her to the harvest supper. He never came back. He died over the Channel that autumn.

But the spring after, a letter reached the oast house in careful capitals, sent by his squadron mate, and folded inside was a hop flower gone brown and papery, still holding a little of its sweetness. The note said only, for the wedding, when there is one. So I have kept it in my waistcoat for sixty years, and today I give it to the bride, who is Ruth's granddaughter and has her grandfather's stubbornness, God help us all. Now, somebody fetch the cake.