Black ink tattoo of a circular postmark stamp with wavy cancellation lines, placed on the centre of the chest beside a dark top.

Postmark stamp with wavy lines on chest

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo is a circular postmark with curved lettering around the edge, a central time marking, a date line and a row of wavy horizontal lines beside it. The linework is solid and even, with no shading. The image shows a close crop of the upper chest with a dark garment held open at the left, and the stamp is the clear focus.

Chest Wavy line Lettering Circle

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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

No, sit closer, the fire will only last for one more telling. That mark on the skin, the round one, is the stamp they pressed on letters in the old days, when a letter could cross a continent by iron road and still be called quick. The ring says the place it left from, a town called Buffalo, on a lake so cold it froze into a floor the gulls could walk on. The PM is the hour the clerk stamped it, the late afternoon, when the light goes thin over the depot. And the date, the fifteenth of July, two thousand and five, which nobody alive can say the sound of anymore.

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The wavy lines were the cancellation, the ink that said the letter had been paid for, carried, and finished with. So when Marguerite Vance found one sealed in a tin under the floor of the drowned depot, after the spring flood took the last of the boardwalk, she thought it was spent and dead like the rest of the old paper. Inside was a single sheet, and the words were plain. Tell the boat I'm coming in on Thursday. There was no name on the front that anyone in the commune still knew.

She carried it up the hill to the Reckoning House, where the archivist, Oskar Tiller, held it to a lamp with his spectacles fogged from his own breath. He read the postmark aloud like a prayer. Then he went quiet at the lines. They cancelled it so it could not go again, he said. Whoever wrote this wanted it to arrive, and it did, only fourteen years past the boat.

On Thursday Marguerite walked down to the shore with the letter in her coat. The ice was grey and the gulls were walking on it, and she stood at the edge and said the message out loud to the empty water, so that at least one thing would arrive on time.