Six-panel photo of a black and grey arm sleeve tattoo with coordinate text and vintage stamps, shown on the forearm and upper arm.

Coordinates and vintage stamps on an arm sleeve

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photographs show a full arm sleeve covering the forearm and upper arm, with coordinate lines in bold lettering across the forearm. The upper arm and elbow carry layered vintage stamps, postcards and paper elements with fine shading and hatching. The tattoo is entirely black and grey, shown in six panels from different angles against a dark background.

Forearm Upper arm Coordinates Paper Lettering Sleeve

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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 postcards kept arriving at the sorting office on Hythe Row long after Mr Caddick stopped paying for his box. Each one bore a stamp slapped on at a slant, and each carried the same run of figures pencilled along the bottom edge: a latitude, a longitude, and a second pair that never matched the first. Miss Dorrit, who had sorted Hythe Row's post for thirty-one years, copied the figures into the back of her ledger because she could not bear to throw away anything she could not account for.

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By the third winter she had a map pinned above the sorting table, with a drawing pin for every place the numbers pointed to. Most landed in open water. One sat on a speck of coast she had only ever seen in the Sunday supplements. The stamps were all different, some torn, some still tacky at the corners, and she began to recognise the hand on the cards as the same hand getting steadier with each one.

The last card came on a Tuesday in March. It had no message, only the two sets of numbers, and on the back a pencil sketch of a crooked gate with a lamp hung from it. Miss Dorrit read the figures aloud to the empty office, then took the map down, folded it into her coat, and walked out to the quay with the cards in her pocket.

She did not go to the coast at the end of the pencil line. She went to the harbourmaster instead and asked him to take a card out on the next tide, addressed in her own careful capitals to a man whose name she had never been given. She paid the postage herself, a penny halfpenny, and for the first time in thirty-one years she was the one sending something out rather than sorting what came in.