Black and grey tattoo on the inner forearm showing latitude and longitude coordinates flanking large N and W letters, with the handwritten words I love you beneath.

Coordinates and handwritten message on forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two sets of coordinates in small serif numerals, set either side of large bold capital letters N and W. Beneath them, the words I love you are written in a thin, hand-drawn script with fine, even linework. The solid black ink is photographed in a close crop of the inner forearm against a plain skin tone, with a blurred indoor background.

Lettering Fine line Forearm Coordinates Compass North West Script Numeral

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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

The pencil marks were the first thing I noticed on the drawing board, not the numbers. My father pressed so hard he dented the paper, and by the time the Dock Commission sent back their corrected survey the margins were crowded with small, furious sums. He had walked the Battery twice that week with a borrowed theodolite and a boy to hold the staff, and he came home smelling of river mud and wet tar.

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The boy was Tom Keary. He was sixteen and all elbows, and he wrote to me on the backs of tide tables because that was the only paper he could afford. I answered on spare tracing linen, folded small enough to slip inside a glove, and posted them through the grate of the chandler's shop where he lodged. For one whole summer the rest of the world was only a sheet of greased cloth and a rope that smelled of the harbour.

When the letters stopped, I assumed he had gone to sea with the Dorothy Hale. Then in October a single card came, pushed under our front door with no stamp. Across the top he had written two strings of figures: forty degrees, forty-two minutes, forty-six seconds north, and seventy-four degrees, nought minutes, twenty-one seconds west. Beneath them, in the thin looping hand he kept for love letters, he had written the only thing he ever really needed to say.

I did not need a chart to read it. I copied the figures onto a clean sheet with a steel nib, pinned it beside the corrected survey, and found the point without any trouble at all. It sat a little north of the Battery, on the edge of the river, a place I could walk to before my tea went cold. I put my finger on it and held it there while the rain started again on the window and the drawing board began, slowly, to make sense.