Painted flash design of a dotwork teacup holding purple amethyst crystals, with a stippled saucer and leaves, shown on paper with dried petals and a sage bundle nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Amethyst crystals in a dotwork teacup

Dotwork · Mixed · Flash

A teacup and saucer are drawn in black dotwork and linework, with ornate scrolls and stripes on the cup and a stippled flower and leaves at its base. Watercolour amethyst crystals in purple and pink rise from the cup, with dotted swirls of smoke and small stars around them. The design sits centred on a pale sheet of paper, with the purple and black palette standing out against the plain background.

Dotwork Teacup Saucer Crystal Flower Leaves Smoke Star Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on the flour sack, love, and mind the proving tins. The oven's not up to heat yet, so there's nothing to do but wait and drink your tea. Yes, that one. The cup with the violet bits settled in the bottom. It was my mother's, and her mother's before her, and the saucer cracked the night the bombs rattled every shelf on Mill Lane, though you'd never know it to look now.

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Before the war there was a tea room across the way, and a girl who worked its counter used to leave her cup out on the sill overnight, the way some folk leave milk for the cat. Frost got in, and the river damp, and the cup filled with rainwater and the bits of purple glass the kids dug out of the rubbish heap behind the chapel. By morning, so the story goes, there were crystals standing up out of the tea like they'd been growing there all their lives. She never drank from it again. She gave it to the baker's wife, who gave it to my mother, who gave it to me, and I have never once put a drop of anything in it.

Listen to the flues now, they're ticking. Half four, near enough. That's when the dough knows it's time, and so do the crows on the chapel coping. Pass me the wooden scraper. Thank you. Now watch the window. Watch the sky go the colour of that stone, grey first and then violet, and the last lamp on the bridge give up its fight.