Fine line black script tattoo reading Wanderlust with an arrow and small circles, running along the inside of a forearm.

Wanderlust script with arrow on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A thin black script reading Wanderlust runs along the forearm, with a fine-lined arrow at the left end and a feathered arrowhead at the right, joined by a flowing stroke. Small outlined circles sit behind the lettering, adding a delicate geometric touch. The linework is fine and even, in black and grey only, photographed straight on against a pale skin tone with a dark blurred background.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Wanderlust Script Arrow Circle Text

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, the cold comes off the water at this hour and gets into the bones. You want the one about the arrow, do you? Then mind the lamp, because I only tell it the once before the lock keeper comes round with his torch.

Keep reading

Old Tobias Quill had a barge called the Thimble, forty foot of black iron and a cabin no bigger than a wardrobe, and he hauled coal up the Ouse for thirty years without once going further than Selby. Then one April his brother sent him a letter from Lisbon with a single word looped across the top in a fancy hand, a word nobody on the river had ever heard. Wanderlust, it said. Tobias took it to the schoolmistress, and she laughed and told him it meant a longing to go somewhere far off, a pull you could never quite shake.

He carved an arrow into the cabin doorframe that very week, pointing downstream towards the sea. At every lock after that he drew a small circle on a scrap of paper and tucked it in his coat, one for each mile he had wanted and not gone. By the autumn the coat was heavy with circles, and his wife, who had never once wanted anything beyond her kitchen, sewed every one of them onto a quilt for the bunk.

The night before he finally cast off, the arrow had split down the grain and the quilt lay folded with the circles facing up. He pushed away from the wall with a boathook and the Thimble drifted out on the ebb with no engine to speak of. Some say he reached the sea. I say the quilt is still in the cabin, and if you lie under it on a still night you'll feel every mile he never went, pulling you the way the arrow points.