Black and grey Japanese style tattoo of a ramen bowl with chopsticks, a halved egg and a spiral, with flowers on the bowl, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ramen bowl with chopsticks on a calf

Japanese · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tattoo of a ramen bowl with noodles, a halved soft-boiled egg, and two chopsticks resting across the rim. The bowl is decorated with chrysanthemum-like flowers and a spiral, with bold outlines and grey shading on the noodles and bowl. It is centred on a lower leg against a pink background.

Japanese Calf Flower Chrysanthemum Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stall stood between the helter-skelter and the goat pen, and Mrs Okonedo had sold broth from it for nineteen summers before anyone asked where the recipe came from. The asker was a boy with a ticket stub clenched in his fist, who had walked the whole field to find her. She poured him a bowl without a word and laid the chopsticks across the rim, the way her mother had taught her, so a hungry man would know the bowl was not yet finished.

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Her mother had cooked on a showboat that worked the Trent, and the showman had a wife who had stopped eating after the river flooded her chrysanthemum beds. Every morning the cook made a broth and swirled a spiral of kelp through it, and every morning the wife pushed the bowl away. One dawn the cook halved a soft-boiled egg with a bent spoon, set the yolk face up among the noodles, and said nothing. The wife took one mouthful and then another. She painted flowers around the bowl's rim that same winter and gave it to the cook, and the cook never once let it chip.

The boy asked if he could buy the bowl. Mrs Okonedo shook her head and tapped the painted spiral with one finger. The bowl travels with the fair, she said, and the fair moves on, and the bowl is always waiting at the next field with broth in it. He could come and find it, but he could not keep it.

When the fair packed up that autumn, the boy went back to the empty ground and found the chopsticks lying across a clean square of grass, set neatly on a rim that held nothing at all.