Fine line script reading not all those who wander are lost, with a watercolour wash and an orange paper plane, on the inner forearm.

Paper plane and quote on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A fine line script quote reads not all those who wander are lost across the inner forearm. Soft blue and purple watercolour-style washes sit behind the lettering, and an outlined paper plane with orange shading sits at the right end. The colour is applied to a light skin tone, and the photo is taken straight on with the arm across a patterned fabric.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Paper plane Quote Script Cloud Watercolour wash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had spoiled four sheets of good calfskin before the wind changed, and by then the ink on the fifth had dried to a crust. He folded the ruined leaves into planes instead of scraping them, as Abbot Gerard had forbidden twice and never quite forbidden a third time. From the scriptorium window the valley fell away in layers of grey and violet, and the clouds lay in it like spilled dye.

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Novice Tomas came up the stair one afternoon with a bread roll in one hand and a plane in the other. "This one came down in the lower orchard," he said. "Someone had written on the wing." Anselm took it and turned it over. The words were in his own hand, faded to brown, from a winter when he had been too ill to rise and had practised letters on the bed linen with a dry quill. Not all those who wander are lost. He had written it as a jest against himself, a sick man's joke about his own restless feet.

Tomas asked whether it was scripture. Anselm said no, only a line he had read in a book of stories the abbot kept locked in the cellar. He had never meant it to leave the room.

He carried the plane to the window and let it go. The wind caught the underside, lifted it over the cloud bank where the blue ran into lilac, and for a moment the orange shadow along its edge glowed like a lamp carried out of the valley. Tomas asked where it would land. Anselm said, "Somewhere it has been wanted," and went back to his desk to finish the line he had started.