Fine line and dotwork tattoo of a tea bag hanging from a string with a small dotted square above, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tea bag with dotwork shading on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A tea bag hangs by a thin line from a small square shape at the top of the design. The tea bag's body is shaded with stippled dots that grow denser towards the bottom, and its top and bottom edges are drawn with hatched bands. The ink is black on pale skin, with the design centred on the forearm against a plain light background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm String Square

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kettle has been going since before you woke, and Marjorie Tull is already at the back door with her boots unlaced, shouting that the frost will have the last of the rosehips if you dawdle. You dawdle anyway. Nobody in Hollin Edge has ever got the better of the wood by hurrying into it.

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Beyond the stile the larches go on for a mile, and under them grows the stuff Marjorie swears by: a pale mint with a bitter root, dried on newspaper in the loft and steeped in a square of muslin she stitches herself. Each spring she sends you in with a pocketful of string and a list you can't read, and each autumn you come back with the wrong leaves. She sniffs them and says they'll do for the vicar.

This year you come back with something else, a crooked bit of bark that smells of smoke and wet stone. You don't tell her where you found it. You hang it by its string from the hook above the range, and by midnight it has bled a dark brown haze into the water, the colour of the pond at the bottom of the lane, and the paper tag at its end has gone soft as cloth.

Marjorie lifts the cup, breathes in, and goes very still. 'Who showed you the far path?' she says. You open your mouth to lie, then to tell the truth, and find you have neither. She pours the second cup, drops the muslin square in the bin, string and all, and says nothing more, which in Hollin Edge is how you know you were let in.