Traditional style colour tattoo of a moka pot with a red flower and a scroll reading DEATH BEFORE DECAF, on the lower leg.

Moka pot and scroll reading Death Before Decaf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A stovetop moka pot is shown in bold black outline with grey shading, with a red five-petal flower and green leaves at its right side. A pink scroll banner below the pot reads DEATH BEFORE DECAF in black capitals, with yellow-orange accents on the pot's base and the scroll ends. The tattoo sits on a limb against skin and a white paper background, with the design filling most of the frame.

Traditional Calf Flower Scroll Banner Lettering Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gas ring at the refuge roars like a small animal, and you are the only one awake to hear it. Below the window the pass road has vanished under six hours of snow, and the radio has stopped pretending it will open before dawn. Your grandmother's moka pot sits on the flame where it has sat every night since this place was a shepherd's byre, its aluminium dented at the spout, its lid lifting and rattling as the coffee climbs.

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The door bangs open at two and a lorry driver comes in stamping, a man called Teodor with ice in his moustache and a voice that has been shouting at engines all day. He asks, almost apologetically, whether there is any decaf. You point at the board nailed above the stove, where your grandfather painted DEATH BEFORE DECAF in red and black, the letters running a little where the paint dripped, and you tell him the house rule is older than the road.

He laughs, then stops laughing when you pour. He tells you his daughter has not slept through a night since she was born, that the doctor said cut the coffee, and that he has been cutting it for a month and now he is cutting everything else too. You hand him the small cup without a word. He drinks it black, scalds his tongue, and says it is the worst thing he has tasted in Europe and he will be back in February.

When the snowplough's amber lights finally crawl over the crest, Teodor is asleep upright in the chair by the stove. You rinse the pot, set it upside down on the sill to dry, and leave the board where it is. Nobody has ever argued with the sign, and you have no intention of starting now.