Small black typewriter-style lettering reading wanderlust across the inner wrist of a raised hand, against a blurred teal background.

Wanderlust lettering on a wrist

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A raised hand shows a small single-word tattoo reading wanderlust across the inner wrist, set in a black, typewriter-style serif font. The linework is crisp and even, with no shading, and the ink is solid black against pale skin. The background is softly out of focus in teal and yellow tones, which keeps the attention on the wrist and the word.

Lettering Forearm Wanderlust Word Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Aldous Penhale had mended typewriters on Trawler Row for thirty-one years, and he knew a stuck type bar when he heard one. This black machine had come in from a widow in Grimsby, a note taped to its carriage: it only types one word now, and I cannot bear to sell it until it does. He fed a sheet under the roller and pressed the keys. Every stroke came out the same, the letters dropping one after another in a neat, serifed row.

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Lifting the lid, he found a curl of brown paper jammed under the escapement, folded small as a stamp. Pencilled on it were three ports, Lisbon, Valparaíso and Colombo, each struck through except a fourth line left empty. He thought of the widow's husband, a stoker who had sailed out of Hull for forty years and never once come home by the road he had left by.

A week went into the work. He cleaned the oil from the segments, straightened the bar with a jeweller's pliers, and wound the spring until it sang. On the Friday he rolled a fresh card in and typed the fourth line himself, the blank one, in the same black letters. Then he typed the whole word again, slowly, so the ink would hold.

When he drove the machine to Grimsby, the widow read the card twice at her kitchen table and asked him what it said. Wanderlust, he told her. She laughed, once, and pushed the sheet back across the oilcloth. "Keep the machine," she said. "He always did want a word for it."