Coffee cup with steam and heart line design
Black and grey · Flash
A black linework design of a coffee cup on a saucer, with curling steam rising from the cup and two coffee beans on the saucer. The cup's handle is drawn as an open heart outline, and the strokes vary in thickness with tapered, calligraphic ends. The design is in solid black ink on a plain cream background, centred in the frame.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The steam off the urn has already curled past the hatch by the time you pour, and the coffee leaves the pot the colour of an old saddle. Ray at table six has been drinking it black since before the highway was resurfaced. You set the cup on its saucer with two sugar lumps beside it, because he never asks and you never stop offering.
Keep reading
Outside, the road runs straight into the heat until it forgets it was ever a road. Nobody stops in August unless they have to. You know the lorries by their horns and the motorbikes by the way they slow for the hand-painted sign that says PIE, and you know Ray by the way he always turns the cup so its handle faces the window, as if he wants the light to find the shape of it.
Then he doesn't come in for three days. On the fourth morning there is an envelope tucked under the sugar pot, addressed in pencil to the woman with the good coffee. Inside is a sketch of a cup on a saucer, with a loop drawn where the handle should be, pulled out into a heart. Underneath, in his cramped hand: the road is longer than it looks from the cab, so keep the kettle on.
You don't read it twice. You fill the urn, lay out one cup and one saucer, and set two beans of sugar on the saucer. Then you pour the coffee and leave it on the counter, steaming, handle turned towards the door.
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