Fine line script tattoo reading "not all who wander are lost" on the upper back, just below the neck, above a blue top.

Script quote across the upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of the upper back and neck of a person with dark hair tied back, showing a small line of cursive script that reads "not all who wander are lost". The linework is thin and even, rendered in a dark ink with no shading. The text sits horizontally near the base of the neck, with a teal top and a plain background softening the frame.

Fine line Lettering Back Script Quote Word Text

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 down, sit, the ovens don't need you yet. You want the old tale of Maud Ferris and the loaf she wouldn't sell? Then listen, because I'll only tell it once before the first van comes up Gallowgate.

Keep reading

Maud walked every lane out of Carrick Bridge with a sack of starter wrapped in wet flannel against her belly. Her mother's yeast had come over the hills, and Maud wanted it baked back into the village. Each morning she lost her way on purpose, cutting through hedgerows no map had ever marked, and her bread came out tasting of whatever she'd passed. Clover one day, wet slate the next.

Her husband Tam, who kept the forge, said she'd end up in a ditch. Edwin Pryce, who ran the bakehouse in the square, said the same, then bought her loaves anyway. One January the snow shut the lanes, and she didn't come home for three days. Tam walked out with a lantern and found her sitting on a milestone, the dough rising warm under her coat, a scrap of paper in her hand. On it, in her neat schoolroom writing: "not all who wander are lost." She'd copied it off a bookmark.

He still didn't believe her. He stood there swinging the lantern, certain she'd gone soft in the head, and she pressed the loaf into his hands, still warm. Every first bake from that oven has a cut across the top shaped like a crossroads now. Nobody in Carrick Bridge has ever asked why. You don't ask a loaf where it's been.