Black serif lettering tattoo of two lines of latitude and longitude coordinates on the inner forearm of a person in a white top.

Coordinates tattoo on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The photograph shows two lines of black serif numerals and symbols tattooed across the forearm, reading as latitude and longitude coordinates. The characters are crisp, evenly spaced and solid black, with no shading or colour. The arm fills the left of the frame against a plain white top, and a small partly visible tattoo sits at the bottom left edge.

Lettering Forearm Coordinates Number

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

Dear Ottilie, the theodolite has been sulking since Tuesday, so I am writing this by lamplight in the hut above Vallon Brisa while Herr Gasser pretends not to listen. We reached the cairn at last. The bronze survey disc was no bigger than a biscuit and half swallowed by lichen, so I scraped it with my penknife until the cross showed clean. Gasser held the instrument steady while I read the figures aloud. Forty-six degrees, twenty-nine minutes, fifty-three point eight six seconds north. Eleven degrees, twenty-one minutes, seventeen point one three seconds east. He copied them in pencil onto the back of his tobacco tin, then made me read them again so he could be sure of the sevens.

Keep reading

Gasser swears the disc will outlast us both, but I have seen what a February frost does to brass, and the valley has taken better men than us. The mapmakers in Trento will have the figures in their ledgers by summer, yet ledgers get burned and bundled and sold for kindling. So I have made Gasser say the numbers back to me on the descent, the way my mother taught us the rosary, until the rhythm stuck in my chest like a stone in a boot.

The snow came down in the afternoon, soft and fast, and by the time we reached the lower pasture the cairn was a white hump against the rock. I turned round once and could not tell which bump it was. That was the moment I understood why the Survey insists on numbers rather than landmarks.

So here they are for you, written in my best hand. If the spring thaw does not show the cairn, you will know where to dig, because the place now lives in two heads and a tobacco tin, which is more than most places can claim.