Black and grey tattoo of a tea bag with a string and tag on the lower abdomen, partly under a lifted shirt.

Tea bag tattoo on the lower abdomen

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A shirt is lifted to show a small tattoo of a tea bag with a hanging string and tag, sitting below the navel above the waistband of blue patterned underwear. The tea bag is drawn with dark outlines and grey shading, with faint lettering on the tag. The image is in black and grey and is framed close on the midriff.

Other String Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody reads the tag on a tea bag, which is why Mr Pallister gave me the job of lettering them by hand in the back room at the Hebden works. Machine tags came out crooked, he said, and a tag ought to look like somebody meant it. So for six weeks I sat under a bare bulb with a fine nib and a tin of Indian ink, writing the same two words forty times an hour: Brew Well.

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Then the batch for the Harrogate order came back from the printers with the wrong blend name, and Mr Pallister sent the whole lot to me to fix before the van left at four. I had forty minutes and a string that kept tangling itself. I copied the old lettering until my wrist ached, then got bored and wrote something else instead: the name of Ida Greaves, who sold my mother her first packet of Assam in 1971, who wore men's brogues and never once let a kettle boil twice.

The van left at four. Nobody in Harrogate ever mentioned the tags. But on the Thursday a letter arrived at the works, written in pencil on squared paper, asking who had put "for Ida, who kept the pot warm" on the back of a bag of Assam. Mr Pallister read it out at the packing table, told us all he'd sack the lot of us if it happened again, and then went to the stationer's and came back with a second nib. He asked me to show him how I did the tail on the G.