Traditional-style tattoo on the forearm showing a grey storm cloud with a yellow lightning bolt above a teacup holding a dark swirling shape, with red flowers and green leaves.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Storm cloud and teacup with red flowers

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A teacup sits at the centre of the design, with a dark grey swirling shape rising out of it, and a grey storm cloud with rain lines and a yellow lightning bolt above. Red five-petal flowers, a red bud and green leaves wrap around the base of the cup. The bold black outlines and flat fills are typical of traditional American tattooing, with grey shading on the cloud and the swirl.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been told by the abbot to stop the weather, and he had done it the only way a poor monk could, which was with a cup of tea and a great deal of patience.

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The storm had come over the moor on the feast of Saint Brendan, grey as a wet fleece, and it had sat on the monastery roof for three days. The rain drummed the slates. The lightning split the old yew by the gate. The brothers gathered in the refectory and prayed loudly, and still the thunder rolled on, impatient, like a dog wanting its supper.

So Anselm took down the blue cup with the chipped rim, filled it from the kettle, and set it on the windowsill. Then he stirred the tea with a spoon the wrong way round, sang the old psalm about the sea, and asked the storm politely to come and sit down. Out of the cup rose a grey coil of steam, twisting and thickening, until it was a small dark cloud of its own, and it went in through the mouth of the cup as meek as a lamb.

The sky over the valley cleared by morning. Anselm poured the last of the tea into the flowerbed under the wall, where red blooms and a single bud were coming up through the frost, and the abbot never learned what had been brewed. The cup was never quite clean again, and on wet afternoons, if you held it to your ear, you could hear something turning slowly inside, waiting for its supper.

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