Purple brushstroke enso circle above the script words not all who wander are lost, tattooed on the top of a foot.

Purple enso circle and script quote on a foot

Japanese · Other · Mixed · Photo

A loose, open enso circle drawn in purple ink with visible dry-brush texture sits above a line of dark script reading not all who wander are lost, which curves across the foot. The circle has heavier strokes on the right and tapers at the lower left, while the lettering is a thin, even handwritten script in black or dark navy ink. The photograph is taken close up against a dark background, with the tattoo filling the centre of the frame.

Japanese Lettering Other Circle Brushstroke Script text Quote

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tobias,

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The ovens were lit at half past three this morning, and I thought of you when the first tray came out, because you always said the bread looked like it had been argued into shape. Mr Pascoe's new boy burnt the first batch of tins, so I sent him home with a bag of stale crusts for the ducks at the mill pond and told him to mind the lane where the cobbles lift.

Your postcard came on Tuesday. Lisbon, with a tram on the front and a sentence on the back in your cramped capitals saying the sea there is the colour of pewter. I pinned it beside the calendar over the proving cupboard, under the little card Father stuck up in 1979 that says not all who wander are lost. I used to think it was a joke at my expense. Now I think he meant the bakehouse, where you can wander the same six yards for thirty years and still find something new in the dough.

Each morning before the first knock at the door I take a fistful of flour and draw a circle on the marble, one stroke, not lifting the hand, the way Mrs Hale taught us at the Methodist hall when we were girls. It never closes. It is always a little open at the bottom left, where the wrist gives out. I leave it until the trade has come and gone, then wipe it away with my apron, and the circle is gone as if it were never there, which is perhaps the whole lesson.

I have decided to bake you a loaf for the day you come home, though I shan't tell you which day. It will be the dark rye with the caraway you hate. Don't write back to say you'll be here by Friday. Just come up the lane before the bells, and I'll be standing in the doorway with the lamp, flour to my elbows, drawing my circle on the step.

Yours, as ever, Maud