Colour tattoo of a smiling cartoon teapot with a curled handle and floating bubbles, in a sketchy watercolour style on a thigh.

Cartoon teapot with watercolour bubbles

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A cartoon teapot with closed, smiling eyes and a curled handle sits at the centre, with a gold rim and a teacup-style base below. Loose black sketch lines outline the figure and the floating bubbles, which are filled with soft turquoise, lilac, yellow and pink washes and scattered spatter. The design fills the frame on a fleshy limb, with a partial second tattoo visible at the right edge.

Thigh Teapot Teacup Bubble Cartoon character Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had buried the lane to the top of the gate by the time Mrs Pargeter decided the teapot had to go in the cellar. I told her it would sulk. She said teapots did not sulk, and then the teapot, which was called Dorothy and was round as a christening bell, lifted its lid and let out a sigh of steam that smelled of bergamot.

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We had eleven guests that week, all stranded by the same drift on the Hexworth road. A salesman of church organs, two sisters who argued about hymns, a boy of nine who kept blowing soap through a wand he had made from a coat hanger. Every morning the boy tried to catch the bubbles before they touched the ceiling, and every morning Dorothy beamed at him from the hob with her eyes shut tight, as if she had been told a very good joke and was saving it.

On the sixth night the power went. We lit candles, and the boy's bubbles caught the light and hung in the dark room like little lanterns that would not come down. Mrs Pargeter stood at the stove with the matches and laughed until she had to sit. "It's the kettle's fault," she said. "She's been practising."

Dorothy poured the last of the pot into eleven cups that night without anyone touching her, and the sisters stopped arguing about hymns long enough to sing one. When the thaw came, the boy took his wand home in his pocket and left a trail of wet soap on the stairs. I still find a bubble in the corner of the bar some mornings, turning slowly, waiting for someone to notice it.