Fine line black script tattoo of an arrow with a crossbar and two lines of coordinates on a woman's upper back, to the right of the shoulder blade.

Coordinates and arrow on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows the upper back of a woman with long blonde hair and a red strapless top, with a white garment over one shoulder. A thin black arrow with a short crossbar sits beside two lines of cursive script reading N 44° 55' 48" and W 93° 20' 43". The linework is fine and even, in solid black ink with no shading, and the tattoo is centred on the right side of the upper back.

Fine line Lettering Back Arrow Coordinates Script Number Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass pin had gone green at the edges, and the spaniel had been worrying the soil around it all week before I knelt down to read the figures stamped into its head. Forty-four degrees, fifty-five minutes, forty-eight seconds north. Ninety-three degrees west, twenty minutes, forty-three seconds. My father taught me to read coordinates off the back of tide tables, so I knew they described a place, but I could not think what a place like that wanted with a walled kitchen garden in Dunmere Lane.

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I fetched my phone from the potting shed and walked the bearing the way the little arrow on the pin pointed. It led me past the espaliered pears, across the croquet lawn, and through a gap in the yew hedge that I had not used in twenty years. The signal kept dropping, so I stopped every few paces to hold the screen up like a dowser until the numbers settled on the spot I wanted. Under the root of the old medlar, a tin biscuit box lay wrapped in two carrier bags.

Inside were letters, dozens of them, folded small and signed with initials I did not recognise. Each one said what had been planted that year and what the writer hoped would come up. Some were funny, one was furious about a neighbour's cat, and one had only a pressed primrose and the words *still here*. The newest was in my father's square capitals and dated the previous March. It said the garden was mine now, and that the bulbs he had hidden in the shed would need a deeper hole than people expected.

I found the trowel, dug down until the soil turned dark and cold, and set in the bulb I had bought on the way home without quite knowing why. Then I wrote my own line on the back of a seed packet, *planted, March, a day late*, and folded it in with the others. I pressed the earth flat with my heel and left the box where it was, under the medlar, for whoever came looking next.