Black script lettering reading Not all those who wander are lost across the upper back of a person with dark hair, photographed from behind.

Quote lettering across the upper back

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of the upper back and shoulder of a person with dark hair, with a hand visible at the top left. The tattoo is a two-line script quotation reading Not all those who wander are lost, in solid black ink with fine, even linework. The soft background and tight framing keep the focus on the lettering.

Lettering Back Quote Word Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart was wrong about the Skerry Gap, and Ailsa Mackie had known it for three seasons before she told anyone. She had a pencil behind one ear and a tin of boiled sweets on the desk, and every chart in the back room of the Harbour Office had her small neat corrections in the margins, none of them signed. Her brother Tam came in with the morning tide smell on him and asked why the lamp was still burning.

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She slid him the sheet without looking up. The old Admiralty line ran straight across the water where the rocks really lay in a crooked crescent, and the Ferriers' boats had been going round the wrong side of it since before either of them was born. Tam read it twice, then read the words she had written in the corner in her cramped copperplate: Not all those who wander are lost. Underneath, in smaller ink, she had drawn the true channel, with a note that said the seals sleep on the western ledge and do not care who passes.

"You've put a poem on a chart," he said.

"I've put a warning on a chart. The poem's for the boats that go off it."

He laughed and then didn't, because the fleet was out and the weather was thickening over Hoy. They walked down to the slip together with the sheet folded inside his oilskin, and the first boat came through the gap that afternoon on the true line, her skipper lifting a hand to the empty harbour wall as if somebody were standing there.