Two small black fine line tattoos of a steaming cup, one on a fair-skinned knee on the left and one on a hairier knee on the right.

Small steaming cup tattoos on two knees

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two people sit side by side, each showing a small tattoo of a cup with rising steam on the knee area. The linework is thin and single-tone, with no shading and no colour. The tattoos are placed close together in the centre of the frame, with the rest of the legs and a patterned fabric visible behind.

Fine line Other Coffee cup Steam Cup

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The urn in the function room at the Crown had been boiling since seven, and by half nine it tasted of pennies, but Dev still carried two paper cups across the carpet as if the whole evening depended on them. Marnie watched him weave between tables of people she had not seen since their GCSE results, past a man selling driveway resurfacing and a woman who kept saying Marnie looked exactly the same. Dev had not changed much either. He still held his head a little to one side, as though listening for a bus.

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They had not spoken properly since the coach to Keswick broke down on the A66 in the rain. Sixteen of them had waited three hours on a verge, and Dev had produced a flask of tea so stewed it was nearly black, poured it into the lid, and handed it to her first. Later, at nineteen, after a bad winter and worse exam results, they had gone into a shop above a laundrette in Luton and asked for the same small cup with steam curling off it like a question mark. They walked out with one each, as if a pact could be made permanent by a needle.

Dev set her cup down on the trestle table beside the sausage rolls. "It's stewed," he said. "Obviously."

"Obviously," she said, and for a moment neither of them mentioned the ink, or the years, or the fact that she had kept the flask lid in a biscuit tin at the back of a wardrobe. He told her his own had faded to a grey smudge, and she told him hers had not faded at all, only stopped meaning anything, and he laughed so hard that the landscaping man looked over.

She lifted the cup and drank. It was bitter and lukewarm and tasted of the coach, of wet grass and somebody's crisps. When she looked up he was still standing there with his own cup going cold, waiting for her to say it was awful.