Close-up of a fine black lettering tattoo on the inner forearm showing latitude and longitude coordinates in a clean sans-serif typeface.

Latitude and longitude coordinates on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of latitude and longitude coordinates, with degree, minute and second marks, are tattooed in a clean sans-serif typeface on the inner forearm. The black ink is fine and crisp with even, sharp linework and no shading. The pale skin and soft knitted fabric at the top of the frame give the image a muted, neutral palette.

Lettering Fine line 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

Ada Pell had been paying the carrier for three winters before anyone thought to ask what was in the crate. It came from the survey office at the county town, wrapped in sacking, and it smelled of paraffin and wet paper. Her father signed for it without looking up from the hay.

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Inside was a brass plate no bigger than a biscuit tin lid, and on it someone had punched two rows of figures. Nobody in Thornby could say what they meant. The vicar called them a sum. Mr Oddy at the forge said they were a bank account that had been posted to the wrong county. Ada's grandmother, who had walked every field boundary for seventy years, put her thumb on the first row and said it was a place, and that the place was the corner of the old tithe barn, where the ground had sunk a foot since the war.

They dug there on a Saturday in March, the whole village with spades and a borrowed theodolite that nobody knew how to level. At the bottom of the trench they found a stone pipe, and in the pipe a tin with a letter from a boy named Harold Lunn, dated 1911. He had gone to find where the county stopped, he wrote, and had set it down so that somebody could check his arithmetic. The last line said the tin was for whoever came after him and had the patience to measure.

Ada read it twice, then went home and copied the figures into the back of her ledger, one numeral at a time, so she would not have to carry the brass plate about. The barn was pulled down that summer. Nobody has measured the boundary since, and Ada says that is how Harold would have wanted it.