Black fine line lettering tattoo of latitude and longitude coordinates on the inner forearm, with a knitted sleeve visible above.

Latitude and longitude coordinates on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two lines of black numerals and symbols, reading N 53° 14' 42.68 above W 0° 53' 13.27, set on the inner forearm. The lettering is thin and even, with crisp, uniform strokes and no shading. The pale skin and dark ink give strong contrast, and the text sits centrally in the frame against a soft, out-of-focus knitted sleeve.

Fine line Lettering Forearm Coordinates Number 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 woman at the council mapping desk read the figures back to me twice, as though the second go might make them sound less daft. Fifty-three degrees, fourteen minutes, forty-two point six eight seconds north. Nought degrees, fifty-three minutes west. She asked whether I wanted the signal box or the Railway Arms. I told her neither. I wanted the stile at the bottom of Leam Lane, where the hawthorn gives up and the wheat starts.

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My father never wrote a thing down he could not say aloud, and never said a thing he could not square with the timetable. Forty years on the Up Slow at Carrow Junction taught him that. So when the lamp room door was found swinging the morning after his funeral, with a single sheet folded inside a copy of Bradshaw, I expected a list of jobs. Instead there were two lines of figures in his square pencil hand, and beneath them, underlined twice: Tell her the 14:20 is late, not me.

I had no idea who her was. Mother had died when I was nine, and he had never once mentioned a woman in the years since. Still, I bought a cheap handheld receiver and walked out on a Sunday with a trowel in my coat pocket.

The stile was there, its top rail grey and split. Under the second post, where the soil was soft from the ditch, my trowel rang against tin. Inside was a bag of pear drops gone hard as pebbles, and a card in my mother's handwriting that read: Stop watching the clock, Frank. The train comes whether you do or not.