Black line drawing flash design of a coffee mug with a Death banner above and a Before Decaf banner below, unshaded apart from a dark coffee surface.

Coffee mug with Death before Decaf banners

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a white mug filled with dark coffee, with a ribbon banner across the top reading DEATH and a second banner across the bottom reading BEFORE DECAF. The outlines are bold and even, with hatched shading on the banner ends and a solid black fill for the coffee. The design is centred on a plain white background.

Traditional Coffee Mug Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ivy Dorrance had run the Brass Kettle on Cutter Lane for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had been served decaf across her counter without a proper argument. So when the council inspector, a pale young man called Tobias with a clipboard and a cardigan buttoned wrong, asked for a decaf flat white on a wet Tuesday in February, she looked at him over her spectacles the way she looked at pigeons.

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"We don't do that," she said. "Not as such."

"It's on the board," he said, and pointed. It was. She had chalked it there herself the week before, tucked under the scones in letters so small nobody could read them, because she had not been able to bring herself to write the word at full size. Then she had rubbed it out, rewritten it larger, and left it there out of spite, the way you might keep a dog you did not like on a short lead.

She took his order with her mouth set, and she did not go to the machine. She went to the shelf above the sink, where her mug sat alone, a fat white thing with a chip at the handle and two banners painted across it in red and blue by a sign-writer who had since moved to Skegness. She filled it from the pot she had been brewing since six, black and tarry enough to stand a spoon in, and set it down in front of him.

"Drink that," said Ivy. "Then tell me you'll be honest in your report. Death before decaf, Tobias." He drank, his eyes watered, and he put the mug down very carefully, the way people set down things they might be asked to pay for. She signed his form with a flourish and pushed the mug back across the counter, still half full.