Travel tattoos on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm rests on a textured white blanket, with long red hair falling across the left side of the frame. The black ink includes the word wanderlust near the wrist, a compass rose, a solid aeroplane silhouette, a crossed arrow, a circle with the word explore and a compass cross, and a fine-line world map lower on the arm. The image is in greyscale-toned black ink with no colour, and the composition is clear and evenly lit.

Lettering Geometric Forearm Wanderlust Compass Aeroplane Arrow World map Circle

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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

Vera Hollis had sold the same railway timetable to the same farmers for eleven years, so when the bell over the door rang on a wet Tuesday in March and a young man in a borrowed mackintosh asked for a ticket to somewhere he could not pronounce, she reached for the big atlas before he had finished the sentence.

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He had a brown envelope of wages and a letter from an uncle in Lisbon. The timetable for the Market Harborough line offered nothing past Birmingham, so Vera spread the atlas across the counter, weighted its corners with the ink pot, the stapler and her own cold tea, and walked her fingers east. The compass rose printed in the margin pointed north as if it had always known where it was going. Across the road, the grocer's window reflected the grey street, and a sparrow argued with the gutter.

"You'll want to fly," she said, and he laughed, because nobody in Thornbury had ever flown anywhere. The following Friday a Dakota would leave Hendon with four seats free, and Vera had already written his name in the ledger in pencil, the way she wrote things she was not yet sure she was allowed to keep.

When he came back in June, brown from the sun, he did not ask for a ticket. He slid a postcard across the counter: a plane on a painted runway, a single arrow pointing at the word explore. On the back, in an unsteady hand, he had written, Your map was right. Vera pinned it above the atlas, beside the faded world, and put the kettle on.