Colour tattoo of a world map with soft watercolour-style fills, a paper plane and a dashed flight path, with the words Those who fly alone have the strongest wings beneath, on the side of the torso.

World map with paper plane and quote

Lettering · Ribs · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows an outlined world map with a paper plane and a dashed flight path crossing the Atlantic, with a serif quote beneath it. The continents are filled with loose, blended washes of pink, green, blue, yellow and orange inside bold black outlines. The map fills most of the frame and the text is centred below it on a patch of skin.

Lettering Ribs World map Paper plane Continent Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the goat, because this is the tale of the paper plane that the Kingdom of Velmoria still argues about in its taverns. It was folded, the old women say, from the spoiled margin of the Great Chart of Harrowmere, where the mapmaker Orla Penhallow had spilled a pot of ochre and then thrown the sheet out to be pulped.

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The plane woke on a windowsill above the harbour and looked west, where the ink ran out into blue. Gulls came first, screaming offers. Come with us, they said, we know the currents off Cape Merrow. Then the swallows, who had a rule about flying in threes. The plane thanked them all and said it had a route of its own, drawn in dashes by a hand it could still feel on its creases. It would cross the Atlantic by itself or not at all.

So it launched from the sill at dawn. The wind was kind for an hour and then wicked, lifting it over the islands of spilt tea and dropping it toward the grey pages of the sea. It folded its wingtips back out with each gust. Twice it came down so near the water that the sea serpents painted in the margin seemed to lean up to look at it.

On the ninth day a gull that had given up on it dipped a wing as it passed, and the plane, too proud to answer, answered anyway. Nobody in Velmoria saw the landing. They only found the chart in the spring, pinned crooked in the mapmaker's window, with a small paper aeroplane resting on the coast of Brazil. Beneath one crease, in pencil and in a hand not Orla's, someone had written: wait for me.