Black script lettering reading Not all those who wander are lost across the side of a foot, with dark painted toenails.

Quote tattoo along the side of a foot

Lettering · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black script tattoo runs along the side of the foot and reads Not all those who wander are lost. The lettering uses fine, even lines with light shading, and the text sits diagonally across the sole toward the toes. The skin is pale and the foot rests on a grey quilted surface, with the ink standing out clearly against the skin.

Lettering Other Quote Text Script Foot

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

The mapmaker's son had walked every road in the county by the time he was twenty, and his mother still set a place for him at Candlemas. When he came back to Skerrow with salt in his beard and no boots, the harbour men asked where he had been. He said he had gone where the paths ran out.

Keep reading

They say the sea took the long way round to find him. Boats went out past the Sound of Harl with their hulls full of wool, and every one came back on the turn of the tide with a sailor who had seen the same grey island and sworn it was new. The mapmaker's son wrote none of it down. He drew instead the coast as his feet remembered it, crooked and full of inlets that no compass would have agreed to.

In the spring a girl named Ebba came to the quay asking for a chart of the world's edge. Her brother had sailed with a crew that never returned. The old men laughed at her. The mapmaker's son unrolled his sheets on the stones, weighted the corners with mussel shells, and showed her the blank patch where the ink gave out. "That is where he is," he said. "Not lost. Only unmapped."

She sailed the next morning in the wool boat with the chart folded inside her coat. Years later a sheet of vellum turned up in the harbour office, the blank patch filled in with a small careful hand: a name, and beside it a single line of ink running off the edge of the page.