Fine black lettering of latitude and longitude coordinates runs vertically down the centre of a woman's bare back, shown from behind.

Coordinates tattooed down the spine

Lettering · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman is photographed from behind, with her shoulder-length dark hair falling forward and a red and white plaid shirt worn off her shoulders. A single vertical line of small black serif-style characters, reading as latitude and longitude coordinates, runs down the centre of her spine. The lettering is crisp and evenly spaced, in black ink on warm-toned skin, against a cream wall and a framed black and white abstract print.

Lettering Back Coordinates Text Spine Number

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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

Sit down, you're letting the draught in, and mind the lamp, it has opinions. Now. You asked me once how old Tobias Wren found the bell, and I told you it was luck, which was a lie for the children. It was arithmetic, stubborn arithmetic, done in the cold on the Vennmark survey ship with frost on the chart table.

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He had been sent to fix the edge of the Drowned Coast, where the kingdom's maps ended in a smudge of blue and the sailors crossed themselves. Every dusk for a month he carried his sextant to the rail and wrote down the sun's height, then the star's, then the minutes between, and every night the sums drifted a little further from the place they were meant to land. Something under the water was pulling on the sea.

On the thirty-first night a bell rang, though there was no bell for a hundred miles. He wrote the position down in his own hand, straight along the spine of the ledger where the binding would hold it. Forty degrees, forty-six minutes, fifteen seconds north. Seventy-three degrees, seven minutes, seventeen seconds west. Then he shut the book so the figures ran down its back like a row of knuckles.

The king never printed that chart. He said the sea had no edge worth drawing. But every apprentice who was ever any good learned to read a book by its spine, so the numbers went from hand to hand down the years, and nobody sailed to the bell. So if you want it, don't ask me. Take the ledger down from that shelf, stand it upright on its spine, and listen.