Fine black script reading wanderlust on a shoulder, with a rocky beach and sea behind.

Wanderlust script on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close view of a woman's bare shoulder and upper back showing a single line of fine black script that reads wanderlust. The linework is thin and solid with no shading, and the lettering runs diagonally up across the skin. The image is in full colour, with the blue sky, sea and tan rocks of the beach filling the background.

Lettering Fine line Shoulder Wanderlust Script Beach Sea Rock

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 third letter came tucked inside a boot, wrapped in oilcloth, and Mabel read it standing in the wet shingle with the tide climbing up behind her. Her brother's hand had always leaned forward as if it were late for something. This one leaned back. Two words were pressed hard into the top of the page, then nothing but a sketch of the headland seen from its far side, the rocks there gone the colour of old bread.

Keep reading

He had sailed in March on the Marguerite with a crate of lamp oil and a promise to be home for the spring fair. Nobody in the harbour office would say which ship had taken him on, only that the purser wrote in pencil and rubbed out his mistakes. Mabel carried the letter along the quay to the galley of the Gull, where old Tobiah was scraping grease from a pan and listening without looking up.

'He always writes in capitals when he's lying,' Tobiah said. 'Lowercase is for the truth.' He turned the page over. On the back, in faint pencil, someone had labelled the sketch with a bearing and a date, a fortnight further west than the last one, and beneath it a line that had been rubbed out and written again: keep the sea on your left.

Mabel folded the letter small and slid it into her sleeve. The next boat bound west sailed on the morning tide, and she had already counted out her coins for a berth. Tobiah handed her a heel of bread and a tin cup of tea without a word, which she understood to mean he would have come himself if his knees had allowed it.