Fine line black tattoo of the word Wanderlust in script with a fine arrow and overlapping circles across the inside of a forearm.

Wanderlust script and arrow on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo reads Wanderlust in flowing cursive script, with a thin arrow running through the word from left to right. Dotted circles sit around the arrow's tip and fletching, and a fine line connects the lettering to the arrow shaft. The linework is delicate and entirely black, set against pale skin on a softly lit forearm with a dark background at the top of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Wanderlust Script Arrow Circle Lettering

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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

Dear Nell, the ink has run again where I breathed on the chart while the lamp was guttering, so forgive the blot over Valparaíso. Mr Hale says a surveyor who frets over a smudge will never go anywhere, which is his polite way of saying he has never been further than Gravesend.

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He has pinned the old Bristol route to the board with a brass arrow, its tip ringed by little dotted circles, one for every port we are meant to reach by Michaelmas. I have counted them four times and they keep multiplying, like the Thursday loaves Mrs Penhallow claims she only bakes once a week. The arrow points west, always west, and the dots crowd round its feathers as if the wind had been caught and given a fence.

Yesterday, when I was turning the sheet to trace the coast, I found something written on the reverse in a cramped copperplate: Wanderlust, and under it the name of a ship, the Mercy Vane, and a date eleven years gone. I asked Mr Hale who had written it. He said a cartographer named Abel Strand drew the Cornish charts before the war, sailed out with a chest of pencils and never came back for his wages, only his maps.

I have pinned that scrap above my bench now, beside the brass arrow, and I trace the loop of the W each morning before the bakery bell starts across the street. Come home before the frost, Nell. Bring me the rest of Abel Strand's story, if you find it, and tell me whether the dots ever stop.