Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a stylised aeroplane with black linework and swirling trails, on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour aeroplane on upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A stylised aeroplane or wedge-shaped craft is drawn in thin black linework with a looping trail curling behind it. Soft washes of blue, green, yellow, orange and red bleed outward from the outline, with loose splashes of colour around the edges. The tattoo sits on the inner upper arm against a dark background.

Upper arm Aeroplane Swirl Splash Watercolour 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 plane came over Scarth Fell at ten past three, the way it did every weekday, and I was halfway through the Vespers rota with my thumb still blue from the cerulean. I dropped the brush in the water jar and climbed the bell tower stairs two at a time, because from the louvres you could see the whole line of it, nose down over the reservoir, trailing its white thread like a stitch being pulled.

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Brother Gregory had forbidden anything but icons in the scriptorium since the spring, on the grounds that a paintbrush was a worldly instrument. I had been caught with a sketchbook once already, and penance had been two weeks of scrubbing the refectory floor. So I painted in secret, on the backs of spoiled psalter sheets, and what I painted was never a saint. It was always the plane: a wedge of black line with the sky folding round it, and the trail I could never get right, because the vapour broke up in the wind before my hand could catch it.

On the Thursday I left the sheet on the bench and Gregory found it. He held it to the window for a long time. The colours had bled outward from the outline the way the sky does at dusk, orange into red, green into the blue, and where the wash had run past the edge of the drawing he had not corrected it. "The line holds the thing," he said at last, "and the water lets it go. You have made the sky want to leave the page." Then he went out, and I thought I was for the floor again.

Next morning there was a new sheet pinned to the tower door in his square hand: a single word, Ascende, and beneath it a blank page. Above the fell the plane was crossing again, and I stood in the cold with the brush and the jar, and for once did not look away from it while I painted.