Black fine line script reading Wanderlust on one ankle and a black compass rose on the other ankle, both in a lettering and compass style.

Wanderlust script and compass on ankles

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two bare feet are shown close together, one with the word Wanderlust written in black cursive script running up the side of the ankle. The other ankle carries a black compass rose with N, E, S and W points, drawn with clean linework and no shading. The ink is black only, and the photograph is evenly lit against a dark background with a beaded anklet visible on the left ankle.

Lettering Ankle Wanderlust Script Compass Compass rose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bus to Carlisle left at ten past six, and Mam had hidden my good shoes under the stairs so I would not run off in them. I went in my plimsolls instead, the atlas wrapped in brown paper under one arm, because Mr Haddow at the stationer's had said a girl who could rule a compass rose freehand could find work in any town with a harbour.

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All that winter he had let me sit at the high desk after closing. He showed me how the four cardinal points sat at right angles, how the eight winds fanned out between them, and how the nib must never be dipped too deep or the ink would bleed into the paper like a rumour. My first rose looked like a spiked wheel. My fourth looked like something a sailor might trust. Nell, who was nine and had no patience for maps, wrote WANDERLUST across the back of my sketchbook in her looping hand and dared me to make it true.

On the bus I opened the atlas on my knees and found Carlisle, then Whitehaven, then a dot on the coast with no name at all. The driver kept glancing at me in his mirror. I drew the rose again on the inside cover, north pointing straight up towards the window and the grey fields, and when the wheel turned past the market cross I found I could not tell which way home was.

I did not turn back. I asked the conductor for a fresh ticket, turned it over, and wrote Nell's word across the blank side in my best hand, then tucked it into the atlas at the page for the sea.