Close-up of a fine line script tattoo of latitude and longitude coordinates in black ink on the upper back.

Latitude and longitude coordinates on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

Two lines of black script numerals and symbols read 41° 52' 2" N above 103° 39' 39" W, set across the skin. The thin, even linework gives the characters a handwritten, italic feel with some variation in stroke weight. The ink is black on a warm skin tone, and the lettering sits in the centre of the frame with plenty of empty skin around it.

Fine line Lettering Back Coordinates Number Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor's chain had gone rusty by the third week, and the king's letter had come up the north road with its seal already cracked. It asked for one thing only: the exact place where the river Ostrel bent back on itself, set down in degrees, minutes and seconds so that no clerk in the capital could argue with it. You were nineteen and the only one in Harrowmere who could still read the old brass sextant without squinting.

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You rode out with a boy named Tobin, who carried the tripod and complained about it in rhymes. For nine days the sky stayed white with dust off the barley fields. On the tenth evening the cloud broke over a stand of dead elms, and you took the reading twice, once by lamplight and once by the last of the sun, writing the figures in a ledger with a pencil that kept snapping. North first, then west, the way the king's clerks liked them.

When you came back the king had died, and his successor had no interest in rivers. The ledger went into a chest with the other surveys and stayed there. Years later a woman from the coast asked you to copy the figures onto a clean page for her, and you wrote them out slowly, the twos and the threes curling the way your hand always curled them.

You did not tell her that the bend in the Ostrel had silted up before either of you was born, and that the place those numbers pointed to was now a field of barley, golden and perfectly flat, with nothing in it to mark where the water used to turn.