Black line drawing flash design of a banner reading Death before decaf, flanked by roses, with a teacup bearing a skull and crossbones, in a traditional style.

Death before decaf banner with roses and teacup

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing on a cream background shows a ribbon banner with the words DEATH, before and DECAF, curling over and around two roses. A teacup with a skull and crossbones sits at the bottom of the composition, with a further rose at the upper right. The linework is bold and even with simple hatching on the banner folds and petals, and the design is entirely monochrome.

Traditional Lettering Banner Lettering Rose Teacup Skull Crossbones

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down with your hands in your lap and listen, because the coffee's only just on and I'm not telling this twice. The bakery on Corran Street opened at four every morning for forty years, and the man who ran it, Tomas Veil, had a card pinned above the proving cupboard that read DEATH BEFORE DECAF. Customers thought it was a joke. The lad who came to work for him that spring thought so too, right up until the Tuesday the grinder seized at ten past four and the whole street was queuing in the dark.

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Tomas didn't panic. He wrapped a tea towel round the cold grinder, shoved a jug into the lad's hands and sent him round the back of Mrs Pellow's house, because she kept a percolator running for the night nurses and never once in thirty years had gone to bed before the milk was delivered. She was not pleased to be woken. The lad came back with the jug slopping over his boots, and by half past four the first loaves were out on the racks, steaming, and the shop smelled of something it had never smelled before, which was a bad morning being quietly rescued.

Tomas poured two cups and passed one across the counter. 'That's a thing you should know about me,' he said. 'I'd rather be dead than drink the stuff that tastes of a warm cellar. But I'd rather not be dead before the bread's in.' He laughed until he coughed, and the lad never did work out which half of that he was meant to take seriously.

The next morning there was a second card pinned beneath the first, in the lad's careful capitals: DECAF ONLY IF THE GRINDER DIES. Tomas read it, grunted, and left it exactly where it was.