Collage of three black and grey forearm tattoos: a lettered Carl Sagan quote, an engraved travel scene with landmarks, and the word travel in fine line script with a heartbeat line.

Travel tattoos: quote, city landmarks and script

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The collage shows three forearm tattoos. The left one is a bold lettered quote reading "We began as wanderers and we are wanderers still", with a name and years beneath it. The top right is a sketched travel scene with NY lettering, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, mountains, a lion, pyramids and a gondola, drawn in fine black lines with light shading. The bottom right is the word travel in a thin script joined to a heartbeat line, all in black ink on pale skin.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Quote Script Travel Eiffel tower Pyramid Lion Mountain Heartbeat line Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tomas wound the clockwork at dusk, the lamp room cold and smelling of paraffin and salt, and found the postcard wedged behind the logbook where the post boat always left them. This one showed Big Ben with its face lit against a bruised sky. Nell had written on the back in her quick, leaning hand: Still going, Dad. Don't let the lamp go out. He propped it against the brass rail beside the others. There was the Eiffel Tower like a pylon that had wandered off, a pyramid in the sand, a gondola nosing through a canal, a lion on a New York street corner with the letters NY over it. Every card came from somewhere she had decided to be instead of here.

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He had taught her the chart at eight years old, tracing the coast with a wet finger. Ships are only ever lost, she told him, when they stop looking for the light. The last card had no picture at all, just a pencilled line that rose and fell like the pulse he used to count on her wrist when she had the fever, and beneath it the word travel, the letters trailing off as if she had run out of ink or nerve.

That night he set the shutter to her pattern, two long and a short, the same rhythm as the heartbeat in pencil. The beam swung out across the black water toward the mainland road where she had once waved from the back of the milk cart, and he kept turning the handle until his palms ached.

By the time the lamp had come round a hundred times, the boats were home and the sky had cleared to a hard, clean white. He wrote the date in the log, then under it, in his own cramped hand: Light kept. Expecting a letter.