Pencil sketch of a cupcake design with swirled frosting, stars, polka-dot strawberries, a faceted diamond heart and a string of pearls, drawn as a tattoo design.

Cupcake with stars, strawberries and a diamond heart

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a cupcake with a tall swirl of frosting topped with outlined stars, flanked by polka-dot strawberries and a large faceted heart shaped like a cut gem. A row of pearls with drop shapes encircles the paper case, which has vertical pleats. It is a loose graphite pencil sketch with light shading and no colour.

Cupcake Frosting Star Strawberry Heart Diamond Pearl Polka dot

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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

Dorota found the cupcake at half past six, sitting on the cooling rack where Mr Ashdown had left it. Nobody had collected it. The order slip read Pearl Ashdown, sixtieth, and tucked beneath it was a card in round, careful handwriting: Wear the diamonds, Sid.

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Dorota had spent three weeks learning to pipe stars that stayed sharp at the points. Sid had wanted strawberries too, spotted with cream like little polka-dot bonnets, and a heart cut from sugar that would catch the light like a stone. She had made that heart four times. The third cracked on the oven door, and the fourth sat in the fridge overnight, swearing at her every time she opened it for milk.

Sid came in at nine with snow on his cap, complaining that the buses had stopped and the parade was a skating rink. He saw the box on the counter and went quiet. Then he said Pearl had always wanted a real diamond and he had never managed one, so this was the joke he'd decided on: a cake that cost more in sugar than his watch had cost in pounds. He ate a star off the tip first, then the heart, which he insisted on doing very slowly.

She boxed the rest with the pearls of sugar drops still standing round the paper case. Sid walked out into the snow holding it level with both hands, as careful as a man carrying a full tray across a moving boat, and the street lamps came on one by one behind him.