Black lettering tattoo of latitude and longitude coordinates in a slanted script on the side of an ankle.

Latitude and longitude numbers on an ankle

Lettering · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two lines of numerals and symbols in a slanted, mono-weight script: N 33° 46' 6" above W 118° 11'44". The ink is a dark blue-black with even, clean strokes and a little softness at the edges, which suggests it has healed. It sits on the side of the ankle against pale skin, with the photo taken straight on and the text centred in the frame.

Lettering Ankle Coordinates Number Script Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's daughter could not read her father's hand, so when the ledger came down to her after the winter gale, she read the numbers instead. Two lines were copied out in pencil on the inside cover: a north and a west, each split into degrees, minutes and seconds, as if the sea had been measured down to the width of a hair.

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Nobody on the cliff road knew what they meant. The fishermen of Scarrow Point said they marked the place where the Hesper went down, and the place the bell buoy would not stop ringing. Mabel took the ledger to the chandler, who turned it over twice and said a number like that was only a spot in the water, and spots did not drown men. She went home and walked the shore instead, counting paces from the lamp.

On the ninth night of the easterly she climbed the tower with a lantern and her father's brass sextant, which she had never once been allowed to touch. The glass was fogged. She found the buoy by its ringing and, through a gap in the cloud, a single star low over the water. It was the right star. The numbers had never been a grave. Her father had written down where the rocks lay under the swell so that whoever kept the light after him could steer clear of them.

She trimmed the wick until dawn. By morning the Hesper's crew were coming in around the outer reef, one boat at a time, rowing wide. Mabel copied the two lines onto a tin plate and nailed it above the door, so the next keeper would know exactly where she had stood.