Black and grey script lettering reading Not all those who wander are lost, running diagonally across the side of the ribs.

Script quote along the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a script quote tattooed along the side of the ribs, reading Not all those who wander are lost. The letters use fine, flowing linework with some variation in stroke weight, and the line curves gently downward from left to right. Part of a hand with painted nails rests at the upper right of the frame, and the skin is evenly lit with no shading in the lettering itself.

Lettering Ribs Quote Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart room at Hollin Quay smelled of linseed oil and cold tea, and my father had been sitting in it since the Thursday tide. He would not let anyone move the lamp. When Mrs Pryce came up with a tray, he waved her off without lifting his eyes from the western reach. 'Leave the sheet where it is,' he said. 'I haven't finished the sounding lines off Carrick Bay.'

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The sheet was pinned at four corners, and across the middle sat a patch of paper he had scraped so often it had gone thin as onion skin. That was where Tobias Venn had walked out of the survey party three summers before, carrying a satchel of pencils and a borrowed compass, and had never been found. Some said he had signed on with a cargo boat bound for Lisbon. Some said he had simply kept going. My father had drawn a fine dotted line from the last known cairn into the blank, then stopped, and written beside it in his small square hand: Not all those who wander are lost.

I was twenty-two and had been his hands for two years, so when he finally pushed back the stool and said his knees had given up, I took the pen. I worked until the window turned from black to pewter. I drew the coastline, the tidal flats, the little church bell at Morrow that rang out of time. I did not draw Tobias. I left the blank exactly as it was.

In the morning a letter came, postmarked Lisbon, in a hand I did not know. It held one line: The margins are wider than you think. Father read it twice, folded it into his waistcoat, and asked me to fetch the good ink. We went back to the sheet together, and in the bottom corner, where the compass rose should have been, I drew a small ship sailing off the edge of the paper.