Black and grey lettering tattoo of latitude and longitude coordinates in a serif font across the upper chest, shown in a black and white photo.

Latitude and longitude coordinates across the chest

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a tattoo reading 40°44' 48"N 73°59'38"W in a serif, typewriter-style font. The characters are crisp and evenly spaced, with solid black ink and soft grey shading on the skin around them. The text sits in a horizontal line near the centre of the frame, with the curve of a shoulder at the top edge.

Lettering Chest Coordinates Number Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Agnes Dobbin had sorted four hundred and six letters addressed to nowhere in her eleven years at the dead letter office in Thornmouth, but she had never seen one addressed to a pair of numbers. The postcard had no street and no town, only a line of figures written in a careful clerk's capitals, and beneath them the word HOME, underlined twice as if the writer had doubted the post would take it.

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She carried it through to Mr Pell, the postmaster, who held it up to the window as though the ink might give up more. He said the figures were a bearing, the kind harbour masters once wired to each other when a ship was lost in fog. They would tell you where a place was, he said, but only that it was water. Agnes asked who had sent it. Pell turned the card over and said the stamp was from a coal steamer that had gone down off the point forty years ago, and nobody had written from her since.

Agnes spent her dinner hours with the old charts, pinning her thumb to the grid and walking it out with a pair of dividers. The place sat a mile past the breakwater, where the tide ran through a gap in the rocks. On Saturday she borrowed a boat from her brother-in-law and rowed out with the card buttoned into her coat. There was a buoy there and nothing else, its bell green with weed and silent except when the swell lifted it.

She sat in the stern until the light went gold on the water, then read the numbers aloud, since that seemed the only fair way to address a thing. The bell gave one clear note as the tide turned. Agnes took a fresh card from her bag, wrote her own bearing beneath the old one, and posted it through the slot of the sea box on the pier on her way home, where it would go wherever the water sent it.