Black and grey script quote running along the outer foot with a compass and gears emblem on the heel, shown beside a close view of the toes.

Quote and compass tattoo on a foot

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A two-panel phone photo of a foot. The left panel shows a fine script line along the outer side of the foot reading "Not all those who wander are lost", with a round emblem of a compass and gears at the heel in black and grey shading. The right panel shows the top of the foot and toes, with a small grey emblem on the side of one toe.

Lettering Ankle Quote Script Compass Gear Foot Toe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The compass came off the chart table the morning my uncle decided the canal had no more use for him. It was a heavy thing, brass gone green at the rim, with a small gear wheel fixed behind the needle so the needle never quite settled where you wanted it. Uncle Tobias said it had been made to point north on a ship that never existed, and I believed him for most of a summer.

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We worked the Trent lock to lock, carrying coal in the spring, bricks in the summer and nothing at all once the autumn rain came. Tobias read the water the way other men read the paper. He would stand at the tiller with his eyes shut and tell me where the shoal had moved to overnight. Once, on a grey stretch below Gainsborough, the fog came down so thick I lost the bow entirely. He pressed the compass into my palm and said, Don't trust the needle, trust the gears. I didn't understand him until the lock-keeper's bell rang out somewhere to port, exactly where Tobias had said it would.

At the end of that season he moored the barge at a bend with no name, where the willows hung into the water like wet hair, and walked off along the towpath with a rucksack and no word of where he was bound. He left me the boat and the compass. I still keep it in my coat. He had pencilled a line on the inside of the lid, so small you had to tilt it to the lamp to read it. I tilt it every morning now, and the needle swings, and the gears turn, and I set off anyway.