Black line drawing on tracing paper of roses, a steaming teacup, a cupcake with an apple on top and a ribbon, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roses, teacup and cupcake design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing on translucent paper showing a cluster of roses at the top, with a hanging tag reading Drink Me beside a cupcake topped with an apple and labelled Eat Me. A steaming teacup with a heart-patterned band sits at the bottom, with a ribbon and hearts scattered through the composition. The linework is bold and even, with no shading or colour.

Neo-trad Rose Teacup Cupcake Apple Heart Ribbon Steam Bow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Cook would not let anyone near the stores after the Tuesday the rum went missing, so he took to labelling everything himself, in red ink on the backs of old charts. The flour was marked Eat Me, the tea in its brown crock was marked Drink Me, and the boys who could not read were told to trust the little pictures he drew beside the words. Every bottle had a paper tag tied at the neck with tarred string, and every tag had a rose inked on it, because his mother had told him that a sailor who could not read the sea could at least read a flower.

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Pell, the youngest, took the labels as a dare. One night he ate a cake from the cupboard marked Eat Me and swallowed the tea marked Drink Me to wash it down, and the galley went quiet while the whole ship waited to see what a boy would become when he did exactly what the paper said. He came up the ladder the next morning no taller and no shorter, though he swore the ship had grown a little around him, and the rum was never found.

Cook never explained the tea. He only nailed a new tag to the hook above the stove, one that said Wait, and under the word he drew a small bow, the kind a girl ties into a ribbon before the boat goes out past the headland. The crew took it for a joke at first. By the spring they had all learned to hold their hands back before they reached for anything in that galley, and Pell still will not touch a cup without first looking at the tag.