Black line drawing of a steaming coffee cup on a saucer with two coffee beans and a heart shape beside it, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coffee cup with steam and heart design

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised black line drawing of a coffee cup with curling steam rising from it, sitting on a saucer. Two coffee beans are drawn on the saucer and a heart outline appears to the right. The strokes are bold and calligraphic with tapering ends, and the background is plain white with no shading.

Coffee cup Steam Saucer Heart

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The steam from the Queen's cup had never been allowed past the second window of the East Tower, and on the morning the Chancellor arrived with his decree, I was the one holding her saucer. He read it out in the flat voice of a man who had never once been warm. Coffee was a foreign vice from Carrow, the beans were to be burned in the square at noon, and any clerk found with a bean about his person would lose his ink. I stood very still and felt two of them pressed into the cuff of my sleeve like a pair of cold coins.

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That night I brewed in the scullery with the door barred and a copper pot borrowed from the laundry. The kitchen smelled of it so thoroughly that the cat came to sit on the bread bin with its eyes shut. Near midnight the Queen came down the back stair in her stockinged feet, sat on the flour barrel, and held out her hand without a word. I poured the cup. The steam went up in long, careless curls, the way it always does when nobody is watching it, and she laughed, which I had not heard her do since the summer the river froze.

In the morning the decree was delivered to every desk in the palace. Beneath the Chancellor's seal, in the margin where a clerk writes the date, someone had drawn a small curling cup and a heart beside it, the lines quick and black and tapering off at the edges. Nobody could say who had done it. The Chancellor frowned at it for a long time, then looked up at the ceiling, where the faintest grey steam was rising from the vent above his head, and quietly sent for a second cup.