Fine line mountain outline with shaded peaks and printed coordinates, plus a green spiral, tattooed across the side of a foot.

Mountain outline and coordinates on a foot

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A mountain range outline is tattooed across the side of a foot, with the peaks shaded in grey and a line of coordinates in black lettering running along the base. A green spiral sits at the left end of the design, making it the only colour in an otherwise black and grey piece. The thin linework is shown against a light blue fabric background with even lighting.

Fine line Other Mountain Coordinates Spiral Outline Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The brass theodolite had been my grandfather's, and he never let anyone else carry it up the scree. Every summer he took the ferry across the firth to the harbour at Skerrin, then walked inland with the case under one arm and a tin of barley sugar in his coat pocket. Every summer he came back with a set of figures he would not say aloud until he had written them down.

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The year I turned twelve he let me hold the notebook. The peaks above the glen were grey as slate in the drizzle, and he had drawn their ridge in pencil with the same care he gave to mending nets. Beneath the line he wrote the coordinates in his square capitals, degrees, minutes, seconds, and then he tapped the small green curl he always inked at the margin of a page. A fern had pushed up through the bracken that spring, he said, and he had decided that meant a place was worth remembering. 'Ground that stays put is worth writing down,' he told me. 'The rest is only weather.'

He died in February, with the harbour lamps still lit across the water. I carried the theodolite up the glen alone in June, the case knocking against my hip, and took the reading at the summit where he had always stood. The numbers matched his last page to the second. I sat on a damp boulder and wondered how many other people had come to exactly this spot and found nothing worth the trouble.

On the way down I stopped at the Skerrin quay and chalked the figures onto the seawall, letter by letter, so the spring tides could not rub them out before someone else thought to look.