Traditional style tattoo of a black teapot with orange flowers and teal leaves, with a red and orange moth below, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black teapot with flowers and a moth

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A black teapot with a curled spout and handle sits at the centre, decorated with two orange flowers with black centres, teal leaves and a red and yellow zigzag band. A red, orange and yellow moth with black outlines sits below it on the skin. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills give the piece a classic look against the skin, with colour dominating the composition.

Traditional Upper arm Teapot Flower Leaves Moth

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, before the urn gives out again. Forty years since the Fourth Form and you still stand about like you're waiting for the bell. Right. You all remember the black teapot in the dinner ladies' hatch, the one with the curly spout that rattled whenever Mr Pryce walked past with his clipboard? Ivy Brand brewed in that pot every morning at seven, for the caretaker, for herself, and for any child who came in early with a cold and nowhere else to be.

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The pot had come from a jumble sale and had a chip in its lid, so Ivy painted over the chip with enamel she borrowed from the art room. Marigolds, she called them, though nobody in the village had ever grown a marigold that orange. She put a red and yellow zigzag round the belly to hide the paint that had run. The spout was crooked and the handle curled like a fern, and she said it was the only thing in the school that never once asked her for anything.

The winter the boiler failed, a moth came in through the hatch and settled on the rim. Ivy didn't shoo it. She said it had come for the warmth, same as the rest of us, and she lifted the lid so it could sit inside and dry its wings. Every morning after that the moth was there, and every morning Ivy poured the tea around it without spilling a drop.

When they knocked the school down, the pot went home with her in a tea towel, and nobody thought to ask after the moth. Last spring her daughter sent me a card with a photograph tucked inside. The pot was on her kitchen windowsill, full of dried lavender, and a single orange wing had caught in the handle. So go on, somebody pour. Leave the cup on the table. Ivy always said the kettle wants keeping on for whoever comes back.