Black ink tattoo of a circular postmark reading Buffalo NY 142, PM and 15 JUL 2005, beside wavy cancellation lines, on the side of a torso.

Postmark stamp tattoo on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A circular postmark with curved text reading Buffalo NY 142, PM and 15 JUL 2005 sits beside a block of wavy cancellation lines. The linework is clean and solid, with no shading, and the ink is a single dark tone. The stamp is shown close up on pale skin, with a hand pulling dark fabric at the left edge of the frame.

Ribs Wavy line Lettering

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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

The letter came to the fair on the back of a cart, wrapped in oilcloth, and the carter swore it had been posted in Buffalo in July with the wind behind it. Nobody on the ground had ever been to Buffalo. Mrs Ottoline Vane, who kept the lottery tent and the only pair of spectacles on the field, held it up to the lamp and read the postmark twice before she said anything.

Keep reading

It was addressed to a boy named Tobias Rourke, who had walked off the fair eleven years before, at the edge of a town in the Midlands, to follow a painted wagon that was going somewhere else. The cancellation lines ran across the stamp like water over a weir. The letter had been folded so many times it had gone soft as cloth, and the corners were black with other people's thumbs.

Mrs Vane sent it on with the lamp-man, who knew the roads. He carried it three counties and left it at a chapel where a woman was sweeping the step. She took one look at the postmark and laughed, because she had been a girl on that fair herself, and she knew Tobias had gone to sea rather than to America, and had never once learned to write a proper address.

So the letter went back to the fair and was pinned above the lottery wheel. Nobody has opened it. Every Saturday the wheel turns over it, and the only words anyone reads aloud are the ones stamped on the paper: the town, the number, the fifteenth of July.