Black and white photo of fine line script showing two lines of coordinates tattooed across the top of a bare foot.

Coordinates script on a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a bare foot with two lines of handwritten-style script tattooed diagonally across the top. The lettering reads as latitude and longitude coordinates in degrees, minutes and seconds, with the characters in thin, even black linework. The shot is close and slightly angled, with the toes softly out of focus at the bottom of the frame.

Fine line Lettering Other Coordinates Number Script Text

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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 had gone blunt by the second ridge, so I copied the bearing in ink onto the back of a seed packet and hoped the drizzle would keep off. Agnes Hollis had left me her old theodolite, a canvas satchel and a letter with one instruction: stand where the gatehouse shadow falls at noon on the longest day, then read what the stones have to say. I am not a woman who takes orders from the dead, but I am a surveyor, and a set of numbers is a set of numbers.

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Caddon Scar castle was a ring of grey walls with nettles where the great hall had been and a chapel that still kept its east window. I paced from the gate arch, two hundred and nineteen steps, then set the tripod over the dry moat and sighted along the bearing. It pointed at the chapel font. Under a loose flag beside it I found a biscuit tin, damp at the seams, and inside a brass disc no bigger than a coin. One face carried a second pair of coordinates, and beneath them, in Agnes's small capitals, three words: YOU ALREADY KNOW.

I knew the second pair before I checked them. They were the coordinates of the bench outside the infirmary where she used to eat her sandwiches and tell me the rivers were lying to the maps. I had walked past that bench every working day for eleven years. I sat on it now, the disc warm in my palm and the seed packet soft in my pocket, and I laughed until a rook complained from the wall.

Then I did what she would have done. I wrote the new bearing on the back of the packet, put the disc in my breast pocket, and left the tin where it lay, because some things are better found by someone else. On the walk back the nettles were full of light, and I did not look at my watch once.