Fine line black tattoo of a circle with a cross and latitude lines on the inner forearm, with a handwritten reference sketch of a globe inset at lower left.

Latitude circle diagram on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black ink tattoo of a circle crossed by a vertical line and several horizontal lines, with one diagonal line running from the centre to the upper right edge. The linework is thin and even, and the design is unshaded, with no fill or colour. An inset photograph at lower left shows a handwritten sketch of a globe with an equator, a marked latitude of 41 degrees 35 minutes and some printed figures, placed against the forearm of a person whose torso is visible and whose face is not in frame.

Fine line Geometric Forearm Circle Globe Line Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The chart table in the Ada Finch smelt of diesel and wet wool, and at ten past four Skipper Ruddock slid a fuel receipt across it with a pencil balanced on top. 'Draw me the world,' he said. 'Go on, a circle, nothing fancy.' Your circle came out lopsided and he laughed at it, then drew his own in three strokes: a vertical line through the middle for the meridian, a flat one for the equator, and a dashed one above for where the boats were working.

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Here, he said, tapping the upper line. Forty-one degrees and thirty-five minutes north. The sea is round, so the ground under the keel turns slower the further you get from the line. Twenty-five thousand miles all the way round at the equator, eighteen thousand eight hundred up here. He wrote the figures in the margin the way other men write prayers, and beside them the speeds, a thousand and forty-five miles an hour at the equator, seven hundred and eighty-five where you stood. 'We're not going anywhere fast,' he said. 'We're going round in a smaller circle, that's all.' Then he drew a line from the centre to the edge and said the angle of that line was the whole job.

For three weeks you took noon sights with the sextant, shouting numbers down the companionway while the net came up grey and light. You learned that one minute of arc is a mile on the chart, and that a bad minute can put a boat on a sandbank for good. On the last morning the sun broke clear through the cloud, the line on your paper agreed with the line on the water, and Ruddock said nothing at all, which from him was a medal.

That afternoon you uncapped a biro and drew the circle on your forearm, the equator, the meridian and the sight line, exactly as he'd shown you, so you'd know where you were even when the paper was gone. The ink stung and then settled. Ruddock looked at it over his mug. 'Now you can't get lost on purpose,' he said.