Black hand-lettered tattoo reading 'Not all those who wander are lost' with a ribbon banner behind 'who' across the top of a foot.

Lettered quote across the top of a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a line of quotation text set in bold black hand-lettering, with the word 'who' sitting on a ribbon banner. The letters use thick and thin strokes with decorative flourishes on the capitals, and the text fills most of the top of the foot. The photograph is shot straight on against a dark purple background, and the tattoo is solid black ink with no colour.

Lettering Other Quote Text Banner

Find an artist for this

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

Mrs Okonedo had stopped painting shop fascias the year the high street emptied, but her hands still itched for a brush. So when Kieran Dunn knocked on her door on the ninth floor of Halden House, a library atlas under one arm and a pencil tucked behind his ear, she took his sketchbook off him before he could apologise for it.

Keep reading

"Thick on the downstroke, thin on the way back up," she said, tapping a page covered in his wobbly capitals. "Letters are only lines that have made up their minds." He had spent a week copying a quotation off the back of a bus shelter, the one about wanderers, and every time he reached the ribbon banner the word "who" came out crooked. She showed him how to measure the banner against the cap height, and how to let the flourish of the W run past the edge of the line like a boat's wake. Outside, the lift groaned up its shaft and a radio argued with itself on the landing.

By November he could letter a full line without rubbing out. The atlas was three months overdue, and a librarian's letters had started arriving in brown envelopes that he kept folded in his coat. Mrs Okonedo never asked about them. She only handed him a tin of black enamel and a sheet of board and said the shop downstairs had been empty since spring and the landlord would not mind a bit of colour in the window.

He painted it over three evenings, the banner first, then the big thin-and-thick letters that spelled out the whole saying across the glass. On the last night she stood beside him in her cardigan and watched the traffic slow at the lights, drivers leaning forward to read it one word at a time. For once, nobody on Ferrier Street had to ask where they were going.