Close view of a small black fine line tattoo of latitude and longitude coordinates on the upper back of a woman in an open-back floral dress.

Fine line coordinates tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind sits on a white bed, wearing a purple and cream floral dress with a tied open back. A small black tattoo of latitude and longitude style coordinates in fine serif lettering runs horizontally across the mid-back, partly covered by the fabric. The image is soft and warm in tone, with the ink reading as clean, thin and dark against the skin.

Fine line Lettering Back Coordinates Numeral Script Text

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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

The last timetable card at Halt Ferris said that trains stopped only when someone waved a lamp, and by the time I took over the key nobody had waved one in a month. So when the surveyor Hollis came in off the muskeg that March, his boots black to the ankle and a tin of wet paper under his arm, I was glad of a customer. He wanted the position of his boundary pin wired to the district office at Saltcote, and he read the figures to me from his notebook, slowly, the way a man reads a prayer he doesn't quite trust.

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Fifty-eight degrees, thirty-two minutes north. One hundred and twenty-one degrees west. He always wrote the seconds too small, so he had to squint, and twice he made me repeat them. I tapped them out letter by letter while the stove ticked and the wind leaned on the shutters. The office sent back one word, CONFIRMED, and nothing else, which was how the office said most things.

Hollis died that winter under a fall of snow on the northern traverse, and the pin was never found. Nobody came to dispute the line he had drawn. Only his figures remained, copied into the ledger in my hand, the only place on earth where that patch of ground had been written down as belonging to anyone.

I still wire them through on quiet evenings, though nobody asks me to now. The key answers with the same flat silence it always gave, and I take that silence as the answer he would have wanted.