Close-up of a black fine line tattoo on an ankle, showing a world map outline beside the word Wanderlust in script.

Wanderlust script and world map on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The photo shows a black tattoo on the side of an ankle and foot. On the left is a outline of a world map with continents drawn in fine, broken lines, and a thin dotted path runs toward the word Wanderlust written in flowing script on the right. The ink is solid black on warm skin, against a dark fabric background, and the composition is tight on the ankle.

Fine line Lettering Ankle World map Wanderlust Script Continent Lettering

Find an artist for this

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

The officer at Harwich took my passport, turned it over as if the cover might say something different, and asked where I was going. I told him I didn't know yet. He didn't like that answer, though it was the only honest one I had.

Keep reading

I had my grandmother's tea towel folded in the inside pocket of my coat. She drew the world on it in 1961, the year she left Lodz with one suitcase and a name she was told to forget. She drew from memory, so the coastlines were confident and the borders were not. She used a broken line wherever she had stopped trusting her own hand, and beneath the ink she wrote one word in looping capitals, WANDERLUST, the way other women wrote a recipe or a prayer. I never asked whether she meant it as a dream or a warning.

I unfolded the towel on the steel counter. The officer's eyes went to the broken lines first, then to the word, and he asked what it meant. I said it was German, and that it meant a longing to be somewhere else, though my grandmother had always insisted it meant wanting to be lost on purpose. He looked at me for a long moment, the way people look at something they cannot file.

He stamped the page with a sound like a small door closing. The ink square sat perfectly straight in the margin, blue and new. I folded the towel back into my pocket and walked out into the drizzle, tracing the dotted path with my thumb across the outside of my coat, toward the bus that would take me into a country I had never seen.