A bearded man pours coffee into a white mug in a kitchen, showing a colour traditional-style sleeve tattoo on his forearm and upper arm.

Colour sleeve tattoo while pouring coffee

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A bearded man in a black t-shirt pours coffee from a glass carafe into a white mug on a grey kitchen counter. His left forearm and upper arm are covered in a full colour sleeve with bold outlines, including stars and other motifs, with red, green and yellow areas. The shallow focus and warm, natural window light keep the attention on the pour and the arm.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Coffee Mug Beard Star T-shirt

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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

Pour it slow, love, or you'll have grounds in your teeth by the second sip. That's the trick of the pot. Hettie taught me that the year the lorries started coming through at four in the morning, when the road outside was nothing but wet tarmac and the hedges glowing under the sodium lamps. She'd stand where I'm standing now, carafe hooked on two fingers, and say a good cup is a patient cup.

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There was a driver called Ruben Tallis who came in every Thursday with a sleeve of stars he'd had done in a shop in Leeds, one for each run he'd finished without a crash. Gold ones, red ones, and a yellow one near the elbow that he said was for the night he dozed through a red light and woke in a ditch, laughing. He'd sit on the end stool, turn his arm on the counter like a map, and tell me which star was which road.

The winter Ruben stopped coming, I kept his mug on the hook. Nobody asked me to. In February a lad in a borrowed jacket walked in, sat on the end stool, and slid a folded delivery note across the Formica. On the back was a sketch of the sky, drawn in biro, with one star ringed hard enough to tear the paper and a line in square capitals: THAT ONE'S YOURS, AGGIE.

I filled his mug to the line, slow as Hettie taught me, and watched the steam climb past the lamp. Out on the road a set of headlights swung round the bend and came on towards us, and I kept pouring until the cup was full.