Colour tattoo of travel stamps for Barcelona, Athens and Marrakech, with a globe, compass star and suitcase, on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Travel stamps and globe on upper back

Back · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a collage of travel stamps and postmarks, including a light blue Barcelona postmark, a dark blue Athens postage stamp and a red Marrakech stamp with a camel. A line-drawn globe, a compass star and a suitcase sit among them, with a small aeroplane outline at the top edge. The stamps use bold outlines with flat blue and red fills, and the globe is drawn in black linework with some shading.

Back Globe Aeroplane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The first card came up through the sorting frame on a wet Tuesday in June, its Barcelona postmark so blue it looked freshly inked. It was addressed in pencil to T. Vane, Poste Restante, Hollin Cross, and inside it held only a sketch of a globe with the Atlantic shaded in heavy strokes and the words Not yet, but soon. Mrs Ottoline Pell had worked the counter for thirty-one years and had never been tempted to read a postcard. She read this one twice.

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Athens arrived in July, the dark blue five with its little temple gone soft at the corners from handling. Then Marrakech, a red postmark with a camel that had lost a leg to the ink. Each card was lighter than the last, as if the sender were using up paper they had been saving for something. Mr Vane never came for them. Ottoline filed them in the pigeonhole marked V, between a wedding invitation and a seed catalogue, and told herself it was none of her business where a man chose to go.

In September came a card with nothing on it but a suitcase, its strap buckled, and a compass star in the corner pointing straight at the counter. Ottoline stood there with the card in her hand for longer than the queue would have liked. Then she took a pen from her apron and wrote on the back of a redirection form: The counter shuts at five. The V pigeonhole is yours if you come for it.

She slid the form into the slot herself and went back to the frame. The next morning the card was gone, and in its place lay a single stamp, unfranked, with a small aeroplane printed on it, and the words Thank you in the same pencil as before.