Black and grey fine line tattoo of five teacups on saucers running diagonally down the inner forearm of a woman with long auburn hair.

Five teacups stacked on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows five teacups on saucers, each shown from a slightly different angle and stacked in a diagonal line from the wrist towards the elbow. The cups have fine linework and soft grey shading that gives them volume, with patterned rims and decorated bands on some pieces. The subject is set against a plain pale background, with the arm raised and the rest of the body mostly cropped out of frame.

Fine line Realism Forearm Teacup Saucer Tea Cup

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Fenwick's wife had five cups and only three saucers, which was the first thing he noticed when the fog lifted off the Kennet and the Heron's Rest came nosing out of the cut at Hungerford. He said nothing about it. In eleven years on the water he had learned that a wife who counted crockery was a wife who had already decided to tell him something.

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Ada set the cups out on the cabin table regardless, each turned a different way so the rims caught the grey light from the porthole. She had bought them from a widow at Newbury market for the price of a bad week's coal, and each carried its own pattern: a lattice of gold on one, a band of running hares on another. 'A saucer is only a shelf,' she said, lifting the cup with the hares. 'The cup decides where the tea goes. Ask anyone who's been left on a towpath.'

The lock-keeper at Hungerford had a saying that the river took one thing for every thing it gave, and Fenwick had never believed it until the night the ropes parted at Kintbury and a saucer went over the side with a fortnight's wages in his coat. He found it again three weeks later, lodged against the sluice gate, a hairline crack running through one of the birds. He carried it home dripping and set it on the table beside the others, and Ada filled it without a word.

That was the year they stopped counting. Some mornings they woke to find a cup gone from the shelf and a fresh saucer tucked behind the kettle, and neither of them ever asked where it came from. The cup with the hares they left on the towpath at Hungerford the day they moved on, turned upright on its saucer and full of rain, so whoever came along next would have something to drink from.