Colour tattoo of travel stamps, a globe, a compass star and a camel stamp on the upper back, with blue and red ink.

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 Barcelona and Athens stamps, alongside a wireframe globe, a compass star, a camel stamp and a suitcase. The linework is fine and clean, with the stamp designs in blue and red and the globe and suitcase outlined in black. The motifs are arranged loosely across the skin of the upper back, with the compass star and an aeroplane outline at the top.

Back Globe Compass Aeroplane Star

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every Thursday the foreign sacks came up from the quay, and Ada Pell slit them open with the blunt knife she kept for string. Most were dull: invoices, bills of lading, a widow's begging letter from Lyon. She sorted them by their stamps rather than their addresses, because the stamps were the only part of the world that ever reached Hull dressed up.

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On the third Thursday of March there was a postcard with a blue Barcelona cancel, addressed to a Mr Tobias Crane at a boarding house that had burned down before the war. Beneath it sat an Athens stamp, then a camel from Cairo with the ink smudged to a shadow, and a luggage label gummed on crooked. The hand was her brother's. Thomas had gone to sea at sixteen and not written since 1919, and she had long assumed the sea had written him off for her.

She stamped it, as the rule required, DEAD LETTER in red, and then sat with it under the lamp for an hour. The globe printed on the back was a cheap thing, lines of longitude drawn over a sea that had faded to grey. In the corner someone had pencilled an eight-point compass star, the way Thomas used to draw when he taught her bearings on the kitchen table with a salt cellar for north.

She wrote her own address across the front, found a penny stamp in the drawer, and carried the card down to the pillar box on the corner, where the last collection of the day would take it somewhere it could be delivered, even if that was only back to her own front door.