Traditional style flash design of a white teacup with a skull on its side, steam rising, green leaves, red roses and two banners reading Death Before Decaf.

Death Before Decaf teacup flash

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A traditional style flash design showing a white teacup with a grey shaded skull on its side, with wisps of steam rising above it. A yellow banner above reads DEATH BEFORE and another below reads DECAF, flanked by green leaves and red roses. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with colour fills in red, green and yellow and grey shading on the skull and cup.

Traditional Teacup Skull Banner Leaves Rose Steam Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The quartermaster's ledger listed forty-one kilos of real coffee, and every one of them had been hidden from me for nine years. I found the crate behind the hydroponic kale, under a tarpaulin that smelled of diesel and something sweeter, like burnt toast. Mother Teodora had written DECAF on the lid in green marker, which was a lie, and she knew I would open it eventually.

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Nobody aboard the Caliban Reach drank anything stronger than chicory water anymore. The cups hung in a row above the galley sink, each one chipped and each one with a painted skull some dead engineer had glazed on its side so the medic could tell whose was whose at a glance. I took mine down, tapped the grounds into the filter, and the smell that rose from the pot made two of the night shift cry without knowing why.

The council met at the third bell. Teodora sat at the head of the table with her hands folded, and when I set the pot down in front of her she studied the steam for a long time before she spoke. 'Death before decaf,' she said, quoting the slogan the first crew had scratched above the airlock, and then she laughed, and the room laughed with her, and nobody asked where the forty-one kilos had gone.

I poured her a cup in the chipped white mug with the skull on it and carried it to her cabin myself. Her hands shook when she took it. Down the corridor the lights dimmed for sleep cycle, and the hull creaked around us like an old boat in weather. Teodora breathed in, closed her eyes, and said nothing at all, which from her was a kind of hymn.