Fine line black tattoo of a world map above the handwritten word wanderlust, on the inner wrist and forearm, with a red string bracelet beside it.

Fine line world map and wanderlust on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A fine black outline of the world map, showing the continents, sits on the inner wrist and forearm above a thin handwritten word, which appears to read wanderlust. The linework is delicate and unshaded, with solid black ink and no colour. The tattoo fills the centre of the frame against a paper map with faint coloured route lines.

Fine line Lettering Forearm World map Continent Wanderlust Script

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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

Ada Penhallow kept the bad stove going through January because the hens would not lay in the cold otherwise, and because her brother Tom had said he would be back before the thaw. He had gone south with a sack of walnuts and a pencil in his coat, promising to send word from wherever the sea ended.

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Each evening she sat under the lamp with his old atlas, the one with the cracked spine, and traced the coastlines with a finger that smelled of milk and lanolin. The men who drew those maps had never seen most of what they inked, and she liked them better for it. She decided the Americas were a sleeping dog, that Africa was a clenched fist, and that Britain, small and wet, was the bit you could hold in your palm when the weather turned.

On the twelfth night of the frost a stranger came up the lane with a tin trunk and no hat. He was a surveyor's man from the coast, and he carried a roll of paper under his arm. He unrolled it across her kitchen table beside the loaf: the whole world, drawn in fine black lines, every coast so thin she had to bring the lamp close. Tom had made it, he said, from every letter he had written and never posted. Along the bottom ran one word in his cramped hand, the same word he always signed off with, and she had never once asked what it meant.

She saw then that he had marked nothing on the page except the coastlines. No farm, no lane, no hens. She took the pencil from the jar by the window and wrote the name of the lane beneath the word, then the stove, then the hens, and set the lamp down so the ink would dry before the frost got into the paper.