Colour tattoo of a cartoon dog inside a perforated postage stamp marked 65 cents, with a lit candle beside it, on the side of the torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon dog in a postage stamp on the ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A cartoon-style dog with large brown eyes and a dark nose looks sideways from the centre of the design, framed by a stamp with perforated edges. A lit candle sits on the left, and a dark background fills the stamp, with the value 65 cents printed in the lower right. Yellow, brown and blue tones dominate, with soft shading on the fur and candle flame.

Ribs Dog Candle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The dog came in on the Tuesday post, sat on the counter of Gorrenby sorting office and would not budge until someone read the letter tied under its collar. Mrs Abernathy was the one who finally slid a thumb under the flap. The stamp was American, sixty-five cents, and nobody in the village had ever seen a stamp like it. The letter was addressed only to Hollis, care of the lamp in the back window, and it said the house was still standing and the road was still there if he cared to walk it.

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We lit a candle in the back room because the electric had been dimming for a week, and the dog took that as an invitation. It curled up beside the wax every evening, ears up, watching the door as if it expected someone to knock. Mr Pell from the parcels desk swore it was worrying at the stamp with its nose, trying to peel it off the envelope, and when he tried to post the letter on to the dead letter office in Exeter, the dog sat on the sack and growled until he took it back out.

In April a van driver called Ruth brought in a second envelope, soft at the corners, with the same stamp and no address at all. The dog took it in its teeth, trotted out into the rain and was gone until dusk. It came back dry, which nobody could explain, and dropped the envelope on the candle-lit counter with a little huff. Ruth opened it. Inside was a single line in pencil, which said only: received, thank you, keep the light on.

We still keep the light on. The dog still sleeps by the wax. Every morning Mrs Abernathy stamps its collar with the Gorrenby postmark, and every morning the date is the one we are living in.