Black flourished lettering design reading Not all who wander are lost, set in mixed capitals and swash letters on a plain white background.

Not all who wander are lost lettering

Lettering · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows the phrase Not all who wander are lost set in large, mixed capital and swash lettering. The strokes are solid black with fine hairline flourishes, loops and tails extending from several letters. It is a plain black ink drawing on a white background with no shading or colour.

Lettering Quote Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the pen, Tobias, it's the good one, the one my father used for the coastlines. Sit where the light falls. You want to hear how the Ordnance clerk at Carlisle wrote back to me in 1931, because he never once used a full stop, and I have spent sixty years trying to decide whether that was rudeness or a kind of grief.

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He had sent me a sheet of the upper Eden valley, every bridleway inked in with a fine nib, and in the margin, where the surveyors put the names of farms no longer farmed, he had written a single line in that looping hand you see on the old signboards. Not all who wander are lost. Underneath, in pencil, smaller: the ones who stay put are not found either. I pinned it above my drawing table and it has outlasted two wives and a sea wall.

The last time I walked that valley was with my daughter, who was furious with me for dragging her up a hill in February. At the top there was nothing but a stone trig point and a fence post with a strip of rag tied to it. She asked me where we were. I told her we were exactly where the map said, which is the most honest thing I have ever told anyone and it still made her cry.

So here is my advice, and then the kettle. Walk. Get the ink on your fingers. Leave a gap in the margin for someone to write in, and do not, under any circumstances, go back to Carlisle to ask what the clerk meant.