Two wrists with fine line black tattoos: a passport-style stamp and triangle stamp on one wrist, and the word wanderlust with a compass on the other.

Passport stamps and compass on wrists

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The image shows two wrists side by side. One wrist carries a rectangular passport-style stamp with a date and a triangular stamp beside it, both in thin black linework. The other wrist has the word wanderlust in cursive script above a detailed black-ink compass with a shaded face.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Triangle Script Wanderlust Compass

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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

The envelope from Lisbon arrives on the last boat before the autumn gales, and you open it standing up, because the wind has got into the kitchen and the table is wet with spray. Inside is your sister's old blue passport, its pages crowded with other people's arrivals. You turn them slowly. Rectangles of violet ink. A triangle from a border post in the Azores. Dates in a clerk's hand, each one a door she walked through while you climbed the two hundred and twelve steps every dawn to trim the wick.

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Mrs Abernethy at the mainland office says the light runs itself now and the Board will not need a keeper after March. You tell her you know. You have known since the summer, when the lens was fitted with a sensor and the brass polish went untouched on the shelf. Still you wind the clock each evening as if the ships depend on it. The compass rose set into the floor of the watch room has a hairline crack through its west point, and you stand on it the way you always have, facing north, waiting for the sea to tell you which way to lean.

Then her letter, its handwriting slanting like something that has been running. She has a room above a bakery in Porto with a window onto the river, and the stamps were a present to herself for finally leaving. She asks you to come. She writes that the coast looks different from the far side of the water, and that you have only ever seen your own corner of it.

That night you climb the stairs without the lantern. At the top the lamp swings its slow white arm across the water, as it always has, and for once you let it go on without you. Pack the blue book, you think, and the good wool coat. Leave the clock running.