Colour tattoo of a pink teacup with a green teabag tag and turquoise steam rising from it, shown on a forearm with a penny beside it for scale.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink teacup with teabag and steam on forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A pink teacup with a handle and a green teabag tag hanging over the rim sits at the centre of the design, with turquoise wisps of steam rising above it. The cup is shaded with soft highlights and a blue shadow beneath it, giving it a rounded, cartoon-like look. A penny is placed below the tattoo for scale on plain skin.

Forearm Teacup Tea Steam Cup

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the time the fog came in off the breakwater, you had already filled the urn twice and the cups on the dresser stood in a neat pink row. Nobody in Porthgarrow came into the Lantern Café in fog unless they needed something hot, and you had learned to read the bell over the door the way other people read the sky. Today it rang at six, then again at half past, and both times it was Hal Penrose from the lifeboat slip, shaking seawater off his cap.

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He wanted the blue cup with the chipped rim, the one you kept for yourself, but you gave him the pink one because it held heat longest. "Tag over the side, like your mother used to do," you said, and he laughed, because his mother had used loose leaf and a strainer shaped like a fish. The steam curled up past the window, where the masts were vanishing one by one into grey, and for a while neither of you said anything that needed saying.

When he finally stood, he left a penny on the saucer, which was ridiculous, since the tea was on the house. You pushed it back across the counter. He pushed it back again. In the end it stayed there between the sugar bowl and the jar of spare tags, a small brown coin going green at the edge, while the fog thinned and the harbour lights came on one at a time.

The next morning you found the penny tucked under the saucer, with a pencilled note on the back of a chandler's receipt: keep the change, the kettle's worth it. You turned the coin over in your palm, then put it in the pink cup and filled the cup to the brim.