Black script lettering reading not all those who wander are lost, with two small bird silhouettes, tattooed along the lower leg in a lettering style.

Script quote and birds on a lower leg

Lettering · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the words not all those who wander are lost in flowing cursive script, running diagonally down the skin. Two small bird silhouettes, one with outstretched wings near the top left, sit beside the lettering. The ink is dark brown to black, with a sandy, sunlit skin surface and a pale beach background behind the leg.

Lettering Calf Quote Script Bird Feather Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The gulls have been quarrelling over the fish heads on the quay since before light, and I have ruined two sheets of good vellum trying to copy out the line you left pinned above my bench. Not all those who wander are lost. Mother says you wrote it in a hurry so nobody could ask what you meant by it. I think you meant it for me, which is worse, because I am the one who stays and draws the coast while everyone else gets to sail off the edge of it.

Harbourmaster Ruddock came up the steps yesterday with the logbook under his arm and asked whether I could fix the reef at the mouth of the bay. Three soundings disagree, and a boy nearly went onto the rocks last week. I told him I would go out myself with the lead line. He laughed, then saw I was serious, and handed me the tiller of the little dinghy for the morning tide.

We found the reef where your ship's rough sketch said it would be, a little further east, and the swifts were skimming the water at its edge as if they had been there a thousand years and owed nobody directions. I marked it in red ink and wrote beside it, here the sea keeps its own counsel. Then I did a thing I have never done on a chart. I drew two small birds in the corner, one with its wings flung wide, and I did not rub them out.

The fair copy goes to the Admiralty on Friday. Near the margin, where a careful man would leave nothing, there is a bird lifting off the paper and a line of script running down the side of the sheet, and a space I have left blank for your return.

Your sister, Nell