Close-up of a black lettering tattoo of two lines of latitude and longitude coordinates in a serif typeface on the inner forearm.

Coordinates tattoo on the inner forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of latitude and longitude coordinates, N 46° 29' 53.86" and E 11° 21' 17.13", are set in a serif typeface on the inner forearm. The lettering is crisp, with even black linework and no shading. The photograph shows a bent arm against a white top with soft, neutral lighting.

Lettering Forearm Coordinates Number Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The theodolite had come up the scree on a mule that disliked it, and by the time Matthias Oberrauch levelled its legs on the flat stone, the mule had turned back for the hut. Rain had sat on the ridge for six days. He did not mind the wet. The district office in the valley wanted one fixed point above the Vallonga pastures, because the two survey sheets disagreed by the width of a thumb, and somebody's cattle had already walked into the gap.

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He sighted the church spire far below, took the sun at noon through a smoked glass, and worked the sums in pencil on the back of a ration card, because his notebook had soaked through. Latitude came first, a long chain of degrees, minutes and seconds that he checked twice. Longitude took the rest of the afternoon. Each figure he wrote he said aloud, as his father had taught him, so that a man counting alone on a mountain would not talk himself into a mistake.

When the sums closed he felt foolish. Two lines of numbers, and the whole grey mountain reduced to a pair of entries that a clerk in a warm office would copy into ink. He cut them into the stone anyway, the seconds and the little tick marks, because stone outlasts clerks. Then he walked down through the rain and told nobody the figures, not even his sister, who asked only whether he had eaten.

Forty years later the road was finished and the sheets agreed. The stone was still there under a skin of lichen, and his grandson, who had climbed up to see it, scraped the moss away with a thumbnail and read the coordinates aloud. "That's nowhere," the boy said. Matthias laughed, though he was far too old for the climb. "That's exactly where I was standing."