Fine line black script reading not all those who wander are lost, with three small birds above it, across a woman's upper chest near the collarbone.

Birds and script quote across the collarbone

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a woman's upper chest and shoulder, with dark hair falling to one side. Black fine line script reads "not all those who wander are lost" in a slightly curved line across the collarbone, with three small bird silhouettes flying above the text. The ink is solid black with no shading or colour, and the tattoo sits centrally in the frame against plain skin and a white top.

Fine line Lettering Chest Bird Script Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The generator van coughs awake at six, and you're already sitting on its step with the route card across your knees, the pencil marks gone soft from handling. Dad drew this map himself thirty years ago, every county the fair has ever wintered in, and you have spent the last month trying to find a single town on it that will still take twelve rides and a fortune booth in October. Derby says no. Retford says maybe if you pay the council in advance. Nobody says anything about the girl who keeps telling you she is tired of being the one who knows where everybody is.

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Three birds land on the cable above the caravans, small and dark against the grey. You count them the way Dad taught you, by the wingbeats, and they lift before you reach three, heading south with no particular hurry. He used to write lines from books in the margins of the card, the bits he liked, and under the wiggly line for the Trent he had written, in his cramped capitals, that not all those who wander are lost. You had thought it was a joke about the drivers. You know now it was a kind of permission he never managed to give himself.

So you fold the card along its old creases and push it into the lining of your coat, not the bin. The lights on the waltzer come on behind you, one bulb at a time, and somebody is shouting for Gary to get the bloody tent pegs. You leave them to it. The bus to Derby goes at ten past eight, and you have never once taken a bus with nothing to sell at the other end.

The birds are a dot above the ring road when the bus pulls out. You keep your eyes on them until the sky closes over the hedges, and you decide that heading somewhere you have not planned is not the same as being lost.