Black ink tattoo of a circular Buffalo NY postmark beside wavy cancellation lines, sitting on the chest below a dark top that a hand is holding aside.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Postmark and wavy cancellation stamp on the chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a circular postmark reading Buffalo NY, PM, 15 JUL 2005, placed beside a block of wavy horizontal cancellation lines. It is rendered in clean, solid black linework with no shading, on a light skin tone. The close, angled framing shows the tattoo across the chest, with a dark patterned top pulled aside by a hand at the left edge.

Chest Wave Date

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maureen Dolan had been working the hand canceller at Buffalo's main sorting office since the spring of 1986, and by July 2005 she could tell a good strike from a smudge without looking. The fifteenth was a sticky Friday. The belt hummed, the fans clicked, and an envelope addressed in careful pencil to Mrs Ada Pryce, Harbour Row, Whitstable, Kent, slid under her hand with its stamp slightly crooked.

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She gave it the full treatment anyway: the round postmark with the city, the time and the date, then a hard run of wavy bars across the corner of the stamp so it could never be used twice. Nobody thanked her for that. Her supervisor called it fussy. Maureen called it manners.

The letter never reached Kent. It went into the wrong sack for the Atlantic crossing, sat in a dead letter bin in a Philadelphia basement for three years, and came back to Buffalo with a clerk's note on the back saying the addressee had moved, and then, in smaller writing, that the sender had asked for it to be forwarded regardless. Maureen only learned of this in 2011, when a retired colleague posted her a photocopy with a single line: yours, I think, still legible.

She kept it in her kitchen drawer beside the spare ink pad. The postmark had come out black and crisp on the copy, the waves as neat as the day she struck them. Some things, she decided, were worth a second strike, even if the only one who could read them was her.