Black fine line lettering of latitude and longitude coordinates on the upper arm of a person in a bikini top, with a blurred sea behind.

Coordinates tattoo on upper arm

Lettering · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of two lines of small black printed-style numerals and symbols, reading as latitude and longitude coordinates, on the outer upper arm. The linework is thin and even with solid black ink and no shading. The background is a soft-focus sea and sky in pale blue, with a striped swimsuit strap visible at the edge of the frame.

Lettering Fine line Upper arm Coordinates Number Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass sextant had been my father's, and by the third week of the crossing I had stopped trusting anything that was not written down twice. Mr Hollis, the purser, thought me fussy. I was only copying figures into the margin of the log, the way Father had taught me, because a man who had lost his bearings once learns to count everything.

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On the morning the fog lifted we raised a black cone of land off the starboard bow. The mate swore it was Ferro, though the chart put us a good day further out. I took the sight twice and got the same answer both times: twenty-eight degrees, twenty-eight minutes and a little over thirty-eight seconds north, sixteen degrees, fourteen minutes and fifty-three point seven seconds west. I wrote them on the back of my hand with a carpenter's pencil so they would not go over the side with the log.

Nobody believed the island was where I said. The captain laughed, the agent laughed, and the boy who sold oranges on the quay told me I had the numbers the wrong way round. So I rowed out alone at dusk with the pencil smudged and the tide turning. The water was the colour of milk glass. There was nothing on the rock but gulls and a rusted ring-bolt set into the stone, and I understood then that my father had never meant the place to be found by anyone but him.

I pressed my palm flat against the bolt, still warm from the sun, and read the figures off my skin until the land agreed with them.