Black ink tattoo of the words Not all those who wander are lost in a serif font, flanked by two small bird silhouettes, on the upper back below the neck.

Quote and two birds on upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads Not all those who wander are lost in three lines of serif lettering, with the middle line slightly indented. Two small solid black bird silhouettes sit either side of the text, one on the left and one on the right. The ink is crisp and uniform, shown in black only, and the subject is photographed from behind with lilac flowers held near the left shoulder.

Lettering Back Quote Text Bird Silhouette Flower

Find an artist for this

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

Right, shift up, and mind the draught, because this is the bit where the lift breaks down and everybody has to walk. Sit there, Kai, next to the radiator. Now. There was a lad called Tomasz who lived on the nineteenth floor of Carrick House, and every evening he went out on the walkways with a torch he'd nicked from the caretaker, counting the pigeons, learning the names of the lamp posts, going further than anyone had told him he could.

Keep reading

His mum shouted from the window that he'd get lost. He shouted back that a map was for people who didn't know where they were going, and he was off down the stairs before she could find her slippers.

Now, two swifts had nested in a crack under the roof that summer, black as burnt paper, and every dusk they went up over the blocks and came back to the same gap, always, from places nobody else could see. Tomasz watched them one night from the fire escape. He asked them, out loud, how they knew the way home from so far.

They didn't answer, obviously. But the next evening, when the torch gave out, he stood very still by the bins and listened, and somewhere over the car park he heard the high screaming call of the swifts going back to their nest, and he simply followed it.

He got in at half past nine. His mum was on the stairs in her coat. She said nothing. She just held the door, the way you hold a door for someone who's come a long way and is still a bit surprised to have arrived.