Travel-themed tattoos on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A forearm and wrist are shown against a beige blanket, with the word wanderlust in bold script at the wrist. Below it sit a detailed compass rose, two aeroplane silhouettes, a circular compass with the word EXPLORE around its edge, a heart filled with a map pattern, and a pair of arrows, all in solid black and grey linework and fills.

Lettering Forearm Wanderlust Compass Aeroplane Heart Map Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Tuesday Mrs Eilidh Marr logged the unclaimed bags at Harrowgate Junction lost property, and every Tuesday the same navy case sat at the end of the shelf, its tag gone soft with handling. It had been there eleven months. Someone had stuck a brass compass on the handle, and a faded sticker of a paper aeroplane had lost one wing to the rain. Eilidh had stopped counting the times she'd thought about leaving it on the bin lorry's route, which she never would, because she was not that sort of woman.

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On the first cold Thursday in March she finally unzipped it to find a name. The inside smelt of cedar and old coffee. Under a jumper folded into a neat square was a road atlas, its spine cracked, and tucked inside the back cover a sheet of graph paper with a heart drawn in biro. Someone had shaded it in with tiny squares, the way you'd fill a crossword, and at its centre was a small island with the words *back here by spring* written in capitals. Two arrows had been sketched in the margin, one pointing out of the heart, one pointing in.

She rang the number on the tag. A woman answered on the fourth ring, and behind her Eilidh could hear a kettle coming to the boil and a radio playing something in Portuguese. "Oh," the woman said, when Eilidh described the compass and the map. "I'd forgotten I'd left it."

Eilidh carried the case to the front desk and set it upright by the door, where the morning trains would be leaving every ten minutes, and waited for the collection to be arranged.