Small fine line black outline of a teacup and saucer tattoo on a leg, with a latte and a plaid shirt in view.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coffee cup tattoo on a leg

Fine line · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A small teacup and saucer is drawn in a single black outline on the skin of a leg, placed just below a plaid shirt sleeve. The linework is thin and even, with no shading or fill, and the tattoo sits in the upper part of the frame. The image is in full colour, with a red and white plaid fabric, a latte in a white cup at the lower right, and a wooden table behind.

Fine line Calf Coffee cup Teacup Saucer Outline

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you. The kettle's only just gone off and I'll not raise my voice for the back row. My grandmother read leaves at the Michaelmas fair in Hexham, in a tent that smelt of paraffin and wet sawdust. She had one cup, white with a chip on the rim, and she never let a customer hold it. Said the cup had to be trusted, not handled.

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One September a lad came in off the dodgems with grease up to his elbows and a pound note he'd won on the coconut shy. He wanted to know if the girl on the candy floss stall would have him. My grandmother turned the cup three times, looked into it for a long while, and said nothing at all. Then she tipped the dregs onto the canvas floor, and the leaves ran in a line like a road going out of town.

Here's the part the leaflets always skip. She charged him nothing. She told him to fetch a cup of tea from the urn by the tombola, drink every drop standing up, and walk the long way round the fair to get back to her. He did it. Halfway round he met the candy floss girl coming the other way with her own cup, slopping it over her wrists because she was laughing too hard to hold it straight.

So if you ever find yourself in a tent with a cup you're not allowed to touch, don't ask what's in the bottom. Ask which way the road runs, and then ask whether you've the patience to walk it.