Close-up of three small black fine line paper plane tattoos with hatched shading behind a person's ear, next to ear piercings.

Three paper planes behind the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Three small paper planes are drawn in black outline, each with hatched lines on one wing to suggest shading. They sit on the skin behind the ear and point in different directions. The ink is black only, set against a light skin tone with dark hair at the left edge of the frame.

Fine line Other Paper plane Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had folded the third plane before the lock gates finished groaning shut, and she held it up to the wind the way her uncle had taught her, two fingers under the wing. The barge Marigold sat low in the brown water of the cut, her coal shifted to one side, and the towpath above was empty except for a heron standing like a bent hook.

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Her father was below, arguing with the gauge on the engine. She had torn the planes from the back pages of the ledger, the ones with columns of tonnage nobody would ever add up again. The first she sent toward Stourport, where the cut met the river and her mother had once worked the wharf. It caught the air, lifted, then dropped into the reeds like a tired bird.

The second she flung north, the way the water ran when the sluice was open. It hung over the lock keeper's roof, turned once, and slipped out of sight above the hedges. The third she kept. She sat on the cabin roof with it in her lap and tried to work out which way her mother would have thrown it, and found she could not decide, so she bent one wing a little lower than the other so it would fly crooked and go wherever it liked.

When her father climbed up to find her, she had already let it go. He said nothing about the ledger. He only sat beside her, pulled a fresh sheet from his coat, and began to fold.