Close-up of a black ink lettering tattoo of latitude and longitude coordinates on a shoulder, above a grey top.

Coordinates tattoo on a shoulder

Lettering · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two lines of latitude and longitude coordinates in a plain, typewriter-style serif font, with degree, minute and second marks. The lines are crisp black ink with even weight and no shading. The skin is warm toned and the background is softly out of focus, with the text running diagonally across the shoulder.

Lettering Shoulder Coordinates Number Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The postcards came through the letterbox on the fourteenth floor of Carrick House, always on a Tuesday, never stamped, just two lines of numbers pencilled small in the bottom corner. Ray had never been any good with addresses. He'd sent a grid reference for the pub, a bearing for the chippy, and once a pair of numbers that turned out to be the middle of the Humber Bridge, where he'd apparently once sat on the railing eating a pasty and thinking about me.

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I kept them in a shoebox under the telly and didn't look at them for a month, because looking meant admitting the coordinates were a joke he'd been making since we were kids on the balcony, pointing at the cranes and swearing we could be anywhere if we only knew the right numbers. Then the Tuesday after the gas men came, I dug the old road atlas out from the bottom of the wardrobe and sat on the kitchen lino with a ruler and a biro.

The first pair put him somewhere off the coast of Norway, which was fine, he'd always said he would go. The second put him in the Fens. The third, the one that came last week, I'd been dreading, because I'd guessed the answer before I finished the sums. Two lines of degrees, minutes and seconds, and the little cross landed squarely on the grey square of Carrick House itself, on the corner of the car park where the bins are.

I went down in my slippers and stood by the bins with the card in my hand, feeling a fool. Nobody was there. I turned the card over one more time, and under the numbers, in capitals so small I had to tilt it to the light, he'd written a single instruction: LOOK UP.