Small black lettering tattoo of latitude and longitude coordinates on the inner forearm of a person wearing a dark top and denim shorts.

Coordinates tattoo on the inner forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of two lines of small black numerals and symbols, reading as latitude and longitude, on the inner forearm. The text is set in a clean, even sans-serif with crisp, thin strokes and solid black ink. The arm fills the right side of the frame against a plain wall, with a dark top and light denim visible at the left.

Lettering Forearm Coordinates Number Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

My father never trusted a map he hadn't walked. In the pit town of Calder Wash, where the copper company had taken the hill and left the chapel behind, he kept a notebook of numbers in soft pencil, each one a place he had stood with a theodolite and a bad knee. He wrote them the way other men wrote addresses for people who had moved away without telling anyone.

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The winter the shift whistle stopped, he took me up to a shelf of scrub above the tailings, where the ground was the colour of weak tea. He pointed at nothing and said, here, this is where the fourth shaft was meant to go. Then he read two figures off the back of his hand, thirty-three and eighty-two north, and a longer one to the west that I still can't say without my voice going thin. He said a place was only honest if you could find it again without anybody pointing.

After the funeral I went looking with his notebook and a borrowed satellite receiver that kept losing the sky under the cliffs. It took three days. I found a rusted winch frame, a flat stone with a chalk arrow gone to dust, and a jam jar of his pencil stubs wedged in a crack. Nothing dramatic. Just the spot where a man had stood and decided the ground might be worth something.

I did not dig. I sat on the stone until the light went orange across the tailings, then wrote the numbers on the back of my hand in biro so I wouldn't lose them on the drive home. Later I had them inked properly, thin and even, so that whenever I reach for a pen to write him a letter, I know exactly where he is.