Black line drawing of a coffee cup and saucer with steam swirls and two ribbon banners reading But First, Coffee, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

But First, Coffee cup design

Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a coffee cup on a saucer, with curling steam rising above it. Two ribbon banners wrap the cup, one above reading But First, and one across the cup reading Coffee in script lettering. The linework is bold and uniform with hatched shading on the cup and saucer, and the image is in black ink only on a plain white background.

Coffee cup Saucer Steam Banner Script lettering Ribbon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on Saltergate market since before the bells, and Orla Penhallow had not yet lit her burner. Her copper pot sat cold beside the tea urns. A man in a wet oilskin came shouldering between the fish stalls and asked her for a bargain before he had even asked for anything else.

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What do you want, he said. She told him he would have a cup first. He said he had no time for cups. She said that was exactly why. She ground the beans by hand while the rain drummed on the awning, and she told him what her grandmother had told her: a bargain struck on an empty stomach is struck by the hunger, not by the man. So he sat on an upturned crate, turning his hat in his hands, while the grounds bloomed dark and the water came up to a rolling boil.

When the cup was set before him, the steam curled up into the grey air and wound itself round the lamp hooks like a loose ribbon. He drank slowly. Halfway down the cup he stopped frowning. The debt he had come to haggle over, his brother's debt to the wool factor, looked smaller once it was no longer being carried on an empty belly.

He left a penny on the crate and walked back out into the rain without his bargain. Orla rinsed the cup, turned it upside down on the board, and lit the burner. Down the row a boy was calling the price of mackerel, and the steam from her pot went up into the wet dark, looping and unhurried, as if the morning had all the time in the world.