Black and grey tattoo on the side of the ribs showing two lines of latitude and longitude coordinates framing a central ornamental scroll motif with tapered points.

Coordinates and ornament on the ribs

Lettering · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows the coordinates N 43° 0' 47" and W 81° 13' 39" in a serif typeface, one line above and one below a central symmetrical ornament. The ornament has scrolled curls and tapered points extending left and right. The linework is solid and even, with black ink on pale skin in a black and white photograph.

Lettering Geometric Ribs Coordinates Ornament Scroll Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow shut the Hollin road before four, and by supper the only guest left in the taproom was a surveyor called Ansel Pike, who kept unrolling his chart across the table as though the valley might agree to be where it said it was. My mother gave him the back room and the chair nearest the stove. He paid in silver and said very little, except that his figures were older than the inn and would outlast it.

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On the second night he asked me to hold a pewter disc while he wound his scarf. Stamped on its face were two lines of numbers, one north and one west, with a small ornament between them: scrolled curls and sharp tapered wings, like a bird that had been pressed flat in a book. "Where is this?" I asked. He said it was where he had stood the spring his brother went through the ice, and that numbers were the only honest thing a man could carry. I could not tell whether he was joking.

The thaw came on the sixth morning, all at once, dripping off the eaves and running brown down the lane. Ansel had gone before light. He left his chart folded under the sugar bowl and the disc beside it, with a note in pencil: keep this until someone asks for a place and not a person.

I put it in the drawer with the spare keys and forgot it for most of a year. Then a walker came through in October asking the way to a ridge. I turned the disc over to check the back, and found a line scratched small into the metal that I had never noticed: here, and nothing after it.