Black and grey illustrative tattoo of a pale girl with a blunt fringe pouring tea from a teapot on the forearm, with smoke-like swirls behind her.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pale girl pouring tea on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised girl with a blunt fringe and dark, heavily shaded eyes holds a teapot over a cup, with wispy steam curling around her head. The linework is fine and clean, with soft grey shading on the skin and face and solid black fill across her dark dress. The tattoo is shown in black and grey on a forearm, with the figure centred and the smoke trailing off to the upper left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle has been singing since the last ferry, and Mrs Ferris has not once asked you to sit down. You stand at the counter of the Lantern Tea Rooms with the brown pot in both hands, pouring for the men who come in off the slip with salt still stiff on their collars. Nobody orders. They simply take the chairs where the window meets the harbour wall, and you fill their cups until the steam climbs the glass and hides the boats.

Keep reading

Your predecessor, a girl called Edith Mallory, drowned off the breakwater the winter the herring failed. Mrs Ferris keeps her photograph by the till, a grey print of a blunt fringe and a face that never once smiled for the camera. "She never left," Mrs Ferris says, wiping the tables with a cloth that smells of vinegar. "She just moved to the other side of the pot." You have stopped asking what that means. You have started counting the cups.

Tonight there are eleven of them, and the tenth wears your father's cap. You have not seen him since the spring, and nobody on the quay will say whether he went out in a boat or simply went. You fill his cup to the brim, careful not to spill a drop, because Edith taught you that spilt tea belongs to the sea.

When the room is empty, the pot is still warm. You pour a single cup for yourself, sit by the window and watch the steam slip through a crack in the glass, up over the harbour wall and towards the lighthouse. Your reflection in the pane is only a reflection, and it is waiting too, its hand already lifted, as if it knows you will drink.

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