Black and grey ornate teapot tattoo with floral scrollwork pouring a stream of bleeding hearts into a teacup on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornate teapot pouring bleeding hearts onto a shoulder blade

Traditional · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large ornate teapot with filigree and floral scrollwork pours a stream of bleeding heart flowers into a teacup decorated with lilies or similar blooms. The linework is fine and detailed, with shading that gives the metal and petals depth. The design is rendered entirely in black and grey ink and spreads across the upper back over the shoulder blade.

Traditional Botanical Back Teapot Teacup Flower Lily Scrollwork Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The teapot came up from the Mary Jane along with a crate of pewter spoons and a child's boot, and for a whole winter Nell Trevance worked the sea salt out of its scrollwork with a cocktail stick and a jar of vinegar. By February the filigree stood out sharp as lace. Her mother said a thing that fine ought to be used, not kept behind glass like a saint's finger, so on the first morning of March Nell filled it from the kettle, set out the cup that had been her grandmother's, and waited for the tea to brew.

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What came out of the spout was not tea. It came in a thin pink stream, a rope of bleeding heart blooms, each one dangling its small drop like a lantern, and they tumbled into the cup until the china rang with them. Nell watched the stems curl over the rim. White lilies opened out of the saucer where the tea should have been, slow and deliberate, and the kitchen smelt of the churchyard wall where the bleeding hearts grew wild every spring.

Tom had gone out on the Gannet eleven years ago and never come back, and nobody on the quay had ever explained why the sea returned a teapot and not him. She sat with the cup in her lap until the hearts went limp and the lilies stopped opening, then carried the whole lot down the steps to the harbour wall and tipped it out over the water. The flowers hit the surface and spread like pink oil, and the tide carried them out past the lighthouse one stem at a time.

When she came back up the steps, the pot was empty and still warm to the touch. She did not polish it again.