Fine line black tattoo of latitude and longitude coordinates above two overlapping triangle outlines on a forearm.

Coordinates and triangles on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm carrying a fine line tattoo of two lines of numerals and degree, minute and second symbols, written in a vertical column. Below the text sit two overlapping outlined triangles drawn in thin black linework. The ink is solid black against a soft, lightly lit skin tone, with a plain dark background and the image framed tightly on the arm.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Coordinates Numeral Text Triangle Outline

Find an artist for this

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 trig point had been knocked flat by cattle before the war, so Ada Mowbray set her theodolite on its broken base and told Teddy to hold still. Holding still, she said, was most of surveying. The mountains would not move if you did not. Across the valley two other stations stood on their ridges like men waiting for a bus, and the three of them made a triangle she could walk in her head with her eyes shut.

Keep reading

By dusk the rain had come sideways off the lake and the figures in her field book refused to agree. The angles closed to within a few seconds of arc, which was close enough for anyone but Ada, who sat on an upturned crate with a torch in her teeth and worked the sums twice. Teddy wanted to know why they bothered. The peaks were right there. Anyone could see where they stood.

She took the pencil from behind her ear and told him a peak was only a peak until somebody wrote down where it sat. In fifty years a surveyor with better instruments would come looking for this exact spot, and the only thing that could guide him was a row of numbers someone had been stubborn enough to trust. Numbers outlasted the men who measured them. That was the whole trick.

They built a cairn on the rise above the water and Ada scratched the latitude and longitude onto a flat grey stone, then two small triangles beneath, one inside the other, the way the survey itself was drawn. Teddy asked if the rain would wash it away. Probably, she said, so you come back every spring and write it again. The stone was still wet when they left, and the numbers shone black against it like something the mountain had decided to keep.