Traditional-style flash design of a blue teacup with a skull and crossbones, coffee spilling out, framed by two scroll banners of lettering on a red splash background.

Skull teacup with coffee banners

Traditional · Colour · Flash

A coloured drawing of a blue teacup and saucer with a white skull and crossbones on the side, with dark coffee spilling over the rim. Two tan banners with black outlines and lettering arc above and below the cup, and a red watercolour-style splash sits behind the design. The bold outlines and flat fills are set on a plain white background.

Traditional Teacup Skull Crossbones Coffee Banner Scroll Lettering Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Vince came in at ten past midnight, which was the first thing that bothered me. He never came in after the lunch rush. He sat on the window stool with his collar up, tapping a biro against the saucer of the blue cup as if it owed him money, and the bus lights outside smeared orange across the wet glass.

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"The usual," he said, then grinned. "Ground up and in the freezer." He'd been saying it since April, over every pint and every pot, usually about some woman who had stopped answering his texts. Everyone in the Lanes had heard it. I laughed like it was a joke, because it was one, and I took the blue cup down from the high shelf, the one with the skull and crossbones that Mum bought at a car boot sale and nobody else dared to drink from.

I'd been making his coffee differently for three weeks. Decaf first, then a sachet of something from the health food shop that tasted like wet cardboard. He never noticed. He drank the way men drink things they aren't tasting, all at once, and then he went quiet, which was new. I set the spoon down and asked him, very carefully, whether he was all right.

He looked at the cup for a long time. "Nobody's asked me that," he said, "since my nan." Then he pushed the saucer back across the counter, stood up and left a pound coin beside the skull. I wiped the cup dry and, for the first time in months, didn't put it back on the high shelf. I left it on the bar, skull up, where the next person would have to ask.