Collage of three foot tattoos: blue script reading Wanderlust, black linework mountains on a foot, and a black outline world map across both feet.

Wanderlust script, mountains and world map on feet

Lettering · Other · Mixed · Photo

A three-panel collage of tattoos on feet. The top left panel shows the word Wanderlust in flowing blue script on the top of a foot, the lower left shows black linework mountain ridges across the side of a foot, and the right panel shows black outline continents across both feet in a black and white photo. The lines are clean and mostly unshaded, with the blue script as the only coloured ink.

Lettering Fine line Other Wanderlust Script Mountain World map Continent

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 copper plate came back from the printers with the Atlantic bitten too deep, and Mr Halloran held it up to the gas jet as though it might confess something. "Look at the coast of Brazil," he said. "It's swallowing Africa whole." I looked, and it was my burin that had slipped, a hair's width of wrong steel that the acid had found and magnified into a sea.

Keep reading

He sent me up to the Cairngorms that October with a sketchbook, a flask of cold tea and a letter for the innkeeper at Aviemore. "The sea I can fix with a ruler," he said. "The land has to be seen." For four days I drew ridges that rose out of cloud and sank back into it, the lines running the way water runs, stacked one behind another until the page looked like something breathing. On the fifth morning the wind cleared and the whole range lay open below me like a dropped coat, and I understood the shape of every hatching stroke I had been copying from other men's charts.

Back in the workshop I cut the peaks into the lower margin of the plate, each one no bigger than a thumbnail. When Halloran pulled the first proof he didn't speak for a long time. The seas were still wrong, and Brazil still crowded Africa, but the ridges sat true, each one shadowed on the side the sun would have struck. He ran his thumb along them like a man checking a bandage.

"Nobody argues with a mountain," he said at last, and sent the proof to the printers with my name pencilled in the corner, which he had never done before. Somewhere off the Cape, a mate would unroll that sheet and trust the ridges he would never climb, and I would be the one who had seen them first.