Adventurer Luke Tarrant on adapting to life after amputation: from survival mode after surgery
Some people are born thrillseekers. For Luke Tarrant, working on the trading floors of London’s financial markets seemed like the ultimate thrill… Until it wasn’t. “I quickly realised I didn’t have a passion for that at all,” he admits. After the pandemic, he quit what he thought was his dream job, and used his savings to travel the world on his motorbike for two years. He ventured through Asia and Europe then south through the Americas, before what he calls a “weird twist of fate” – a crash in Colombia in which he lost his leg.
Since becoming an amputee, Luke now travels for a living, and a world of adventure has opened up to him. “I find it weird to brand myself as disabled,” Luke admits. “I am disabled, like the dictionary definition, but I see myself as just happening to have one less limb. It’s just normal life but a bit different.” Considering his accident only happened a year and a half ago, Luke has adjusted astoundingly well – and quickly – to life as an amputee.
IT HIT ME LIKE A TRAIN
But that’s not to say he doesn’t face challenges. Enduring multiple surgeries and sepsis in Colombia left him in survival mode. When he returned to the UK, his first visit home was tough. In his NHS standard wheelchair, he struggled with heavy doors and narrow spaces in his flat, and recalls: “I got home and it hit me like a train – I had this realisation that I’d become disabled.”
Feeling “miserable for that weekend,” Luke got back into the swing of things when he returned to hospital: “Over the course of a week, I shed that feeling of despair. The next time I came home, it happened again, but it was less severe.” Luke finds that scenario still repeats, but the frustration gets less each time: “I’ll find a way around whatever the problem is and carry on, and that feeling is gone.” However, he still acknowledges: “Living life with one leg is harder than I think I make it look! Sometimes it is hard.”
AN INTERESTING LIFE
The learning curve of adapting to being disabled hasn’t stifled Luke’s adventurous spirit: “I’ve always had this desire to have an interesting life,” he shares. From adaptive skiing in France to jet skiing in Portugal, walking the Great Wall of China, bungee jumping at Victoria Falls, a New Year’s Day swim off the Welsh coast, scaling rock faces in Yosemite, and going on safari in Botswana, Luke’s wanderlust knows no bounds.
But he’s keen to remind people this is what he was doing before he became an amputee. “No one called me a hero before when I was riding my motorbike around the world,” he admits. “Now everyone’s like ‘he’s so inspirational’. But I was doing that anyway – the reason I’m still doing it now is because I don’t want to live my life any differently.”
Despite having more than half a million social media followers, Luke never set out to be a role model. But, while recently in an airport in Malta, he met a couple who’d been inspired by him. “The husband had his leg amputated, and he’d lost himself,” explains Luke. “He refused to go on holiday, and was worried he wouldn’t be able to do what he used to.” The couple had seen a video of Luke going in the sea wearing his prosthetic, rinsing it off and heading for dinner, and booked themselves a holiday that same day. “He’d realised he was holding himself back, but it was still possible. That’s the message I try and put out there.”
A BUMPY ROAD
As someone who’s recently become disabled, what’s Luke’s advice to others dealing with a similar life change? “Just roll with it,” he says. “There’s no point pretending it’s not gonna be hard, because it is. And when you think you’ve got over the hard bit, there’ll be another hard bit. Be aware it won’t be easy, and make peace with it.”
Luke visited 21 countries in 2025 alone, and 2026 has already seen plenty of new stamps added to his passport. But there’s a bigger journey to come: “My plan later this year is to finish the bike trip I crashed on, because I feel like I’ve been in limbo since. Part of that will be going back to where I crashed in Colombia and trying to work out what happened. Until that trip is done, I can’t really think about much else.”
The 30-year-old has only been on a motorbike once since losing his leg. At a track meet in New York, he was “nervous to be getting back on a bike. Before my accident, I’d be on my bike all day every day, in that flow state which I love so much.” He found his first time back on a motorbike emotional and had planned to take it slowly. “The next day I let it rip,” he laughs aloud. “The idea of tootling along carefully was out the window – I didn’t even think about my leg. I was absolutely sending it around the track, it was wicked!”
As Luke says: “Four wheels move the body, two wheels move the soul.” We can’t wait to see where his adventures move him next.