Fine line black outline tattoo of a world map with the word wanderlust in script, on a woman's upper back near the shoulder blade.

World map outline with wanderlust script on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman with flowers in her hair is photographed from behind, showing a single-line outline map of the continents on her upper back. The word wanderlust is written in a small, cursive script beneath the map. The ink is dark and thin, set against soft, warm, out-of-focus greenery and a cream lace dress.

Fine line Back World map Continent Wanderlust Script Outline Map

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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 nearer the fire, the wind comes through this wall the way it came through my grandmother's teeth. You want the one about Maud Tallis and the ink that would not lift? Good. Up on the headland there was a keep with no roof left, and in its last room a mapmaker called Ansel Crewe kept a drafting table, a brass lamp and a daughter who was not allowed to touch either.

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Maud was nine when she learned to draw the world without taking the pen off the paper. Her father said a line that breaks is a border drawn by cowards. So she went round the coast of every land in one stroke, down the long spine of the first continent, across the grey water to the bulge of the next, and she never stopped for the sea, because the sea is only the space between the things you mean to reach.

The villagers thought it witchcraft. They came up the path with bread and questions, and Ansel sent them away with a sharp word and a bolt for the door. But the girl kept drawing, and by the winter she was nearly eleven her map was finished, every shore joined to the next in a single dark thread, the ink never once thinning where the pen had turned.

Her father found the sheet folded under his lamp the morning after the great storm. The line closed on itself like a knot pulled tight. Beneath the southern lands, in a hand too small for the margin, she had written one word that was not a place at all. He never asked her what it meant. He only sat a long while with his finger on the thread, then went down the path with his coat open to the wind, and nobody on the headland saw him come back.