Fine line black tattoo of a coffee mug with rising steam, placed on the skin behind a person's ear.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Coffee mug behind the ear

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline tattoo of a coffee mug with a curved handle and three wavy lines of steam rising from the top, shown in close-up on the skin behind an ear. The linework is thin, even and dark, with no shading, and the design sits off-centre on the right of the frame. The photograph is black and white, with a metal ear piercing and loose hair framing the ear.

Fine line Other Steam Cup 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

Brother Anselm had never once been allowed to say the word coffee at table, so when the abbot's letter arrived asking me to keep the night office at Llanfair Priory, I packed a tin of beans between my psalter and my spare habit and told nobody. The guest house had a brass hot plate and a kettle that rattled like a cart on cobbles. Every night at two I stood at its window with the tin open and listened to the wind come down off the moor.

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The chapel bell was the only other thing awake. Some nights I heard footsteps in the cloister and then nothing, and I understood that someone had come to the kitchen door, seen the thin ribbon of steam above the sill, and walked away again. I never asked who. A man who keeps a secret in a monastery learns quickly that the walls are full of other men keeping theirs.

On the feast of Saint Brendan, the cellarer found the mug. It was my one vice, an enamel thing with a chipped rim, and he held it up in the refectory like evidence. The silence went on long enough that I was sure I would be sent back to the abbey in disgrace. Then old Father Giles, who had not spoken aloud in a year, reached across the bread and asked whether there was any left.

We drank it together by the window, badly, and the steam climbed into the dark the way it had every night before anyone was watching.