Single-tone black tattoo on a chest showing a circular postmark reading Buffalo NY with PM and a date, beside wavy cancellation lines.

Postmark stamp tattoo on the chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a chest tattoo shaped like a postage stamp postmark, with a circular stamp reading BUFFALO NY, PM and a date, next to a set of wavy cancellation lines. The linework is clean and even, with the ink solid and uniform in a dark blue-black tone. A hand holds a dark patterned fabric at the left edge, and the tattoo sits near the centre of the frame.

Chest Wavy line Circle Text Date

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The envelope came down the belt with its corner gone soft from somebody's pocket, and Maureen Tully pulled it off the pile herself because the cancelling machine had jammed again on the late shift. She inked the rubber stamp, pressed it hard, and watched the circle bite into the paper: BUFFALO NY, PM, the month and year in a neat ring. Then she dragged the wavy lines across the corner, back and forth, the way her father had taught her to cross out a mistake in a ledger. Her thumb stayed black to the knuckle for the rest of the shift. Nineteen years at the counter and she had never once read a letter she cancelled.

Keep reading

This one she read anyway, because the address was in pencil and had smudged in the rain. Mrs Stella Varga, the blue door, Lantern Row, Galway. Beneath it someone had written HOLD IF NOT KNOWN, then scored a line through the words as though they had changed their minds. Maureen turned the envelope over. The flap had been licked and pressed down with a thumb, and the paper was thin enough that the single sheet inside showed as a grey shadow: a few lines of handwriting and, folded in the corner, what looked like a drawing of a boat.

She could have dropped it back in the sack with the rest. Instead she took a fresh label from the drawer, wrote RETURN IF NOT FOUND in capitals, and tucked it under the flap where the postman would see it on the Monday round. It would cross the Atlantic in a sealed bag and wait in Galway for someone to be careful with it, and she could not have said why that mattered more to her than the rules did.

Outside, the rain had stopped. Maureen held her inky hand up under the streetlight, the faint wave of the lines still printed across the side of her finger, and walked home without washing it.