Black and grey lettering tattoo reading Not all those who wander are lost, with swirling flourishes, across the top of a foot.

Quote lettering with swirls across a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads Not all those who wander are lost in a flowing serif-style script that follows a curved line across the top of the foot. Small swooping flourish strokes frame the first and last words and trail beside the lettering. The ink is solid black with a slightly soft edge, and the photograph is shot close up on a grey carpet with a shallow depth of field.

Lettering Other Quote Lettering Text Foot Swirl

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

Sit closer, the lot of you, the stove's only warm on this side. You want the story of Tobias Wren, who stepped off the towpath at Earith with nothing but a folded paper in his coat. The paper had five words on it in his grandmother's cramped hand, with a long curl under them like the wake of a boat, and he believed every one.

Keep reading

He walked the fen roads for three weeks. Men in the pubs told him he'd lost his wits. A ferrywoman near Ely gave him bread and asked what the paper said, and when he read it out she laughed so hard she had to sit down on her own step. Not all those who wander are lost, she said, though some are only slow to find the door they meant. Then she charged him a penny for a crossing he hadn't needed.

He came back to the barge in the autumn, thinner, with mud to his knees. His grandmother was dead by then, and the boat had been sold and bought back twice. He sat on the cabin roof and unfolded the paper again, and he saw that the curl under the words ran the whole length of the page, a river drawn in ink, and that it ended exactly where he was sitting. Hush now. That's the whole of it. Mind the stove on your way out.