Fine line black outline of a world map on the inner forearm, with the word wanderlust in script beneath it, set against a paper map.

World map outline with script on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black outline world map sits on the inner forearm, with continents drawn in a single thin line and no shading. Below it, the word wanderlust is written in a joined, handwritten script that runs across the wrist. The ink is solid black and the background is a folded paper map in blue, green and yellow.

Fine line Lettering Forearm World map Map Script Wanderlust Continent Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind that coil of rope, it bites. You'll want to know why Ada Pruett never once lifted her pen. Her father drew maps for the canal company at Stoke, flat drawings on linen, and she sat under his bench tracing the shapes with a wet finger. One March, aged nine, she borrowed a steel nib and a pot of black ink and started on the back of an old lock-keeper's ledger. She drew the whole world without lifting once. Round the Americas, down over the Cape, up through the cold bits at the top, the line running on like a towrope behind a horse.

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The bargemen laughed at her. Her father said the sea would not hold still for a single line, and her mother said a child who never lifts a pen will never finish a letter. Ada only shrugged. Lifting the pen was how people got lost, she said, because every break was a place where you could fall off the edge. So she pressed the nib so gently the lines came out thin as a hair, and when the ink ran dry she filled the pot with soot and water and carried on.

Her brother Tobias took the ledger when he went to the docks at Hull with nothing but a kitbag. He wrote to her from every port the line touched. Lisbon, Cape Town, a place called Valparaiso where the rain came in sideways. At each he marked the nearest river with a dot, and by the time the letters stopped the ledger was freckled all over like a tired hand.

The line closes at the Thames, where it began, because Ada drew it back to the very spot she was standing. That's the part nobody believes until they try it. So when you lie awake on this boat with the water knocking at the hull, don't think about the edges of anything. Think of one stroke going round and round, always arriving back where you started.