Black and grey tattoo of a beer tap handle and base on a man's stomach, with a beer bottle held in one hand below it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Beer tap tattoo on a stomach

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A close shot of a man's bare stomach showing a black and grey tattoo of a beer tap, with a tall handle above a round base. The shading is soft and greyscale, with a lettered badge on the handle. A brown beer bottle is held in the lower foreground, and a blue top is visible at the left edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Mags,

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The handle came up from the hydroponics deck on Tuesday, wrapped in a tea towel and smelling of old hops. Nobody on Halvard Station has seen a proper tap since the Founders' archive was stripped for scrap, so Old Pell held it up to the lamp like a holy relic and wouldn't let anyone touch the badge until he'd finished crying.

The badge is the thing. Someone pressed a lettered plate onto the chrome, and the letters have worn down to a ghost of a word, but the round base beneath it is still sound, a heavy disc that rings when you rap it with a knuckle. Pell reckons it was bolted to a bar in the old world, somewhere with a floor that didn't move. We fitted it to the dispensing rail of the galley on Thursday, which means the crew's ration of kelp cordial now comes out of a fancy chrome arm, and Dasha has started pulling measures with a flourish that makes the engineers wince.

Here is what I didn't expect. When Pell poured the first glass, the cloudy stuff ran clear for a moment, the way the old manuals say it used to. Nobody spoke. Then the kelp swill came through, sour and thin, and Pell swore and laughed, and we all drank it anyway, because it was ours and it was cold.

I've kept the first glass for you. Come up on the next shuttle and we'll drink it together, and you can tell me whether the badge says what Pell thinks it does.

Love, Ines