Traditional style colour tattoo on an upper arm showing a teapot, teacup, red flowers and green leaves above a orange banner that reads TEA LOVER.

Tea lover banner with teapot and flowers on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a black teapot and red teacup with a tea bag tag, framed by two red five-petal flowers and green leaves with curling stems. A yellow and orange banner across the middle reads TEA LOVER in black lettering. Bold black outlines and smooth shading give the design a classic flash look, with colour dominating the composition.

Traditional Upper arm Teapot Teacup Flower Rose Leaves Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the kettle's not boiled and I'll not be hurried. Forty-one days out of Valparaiso and the Mary Quill's tea caddy was empty by the time we raised the Horn. You don't know what that does to a crew. Grown men went quiet over their burgoo like children who'd lost a marble. So I took the black enamel pot down off its hook, the one with the red mark stamped on its belly that Old Ada gave my father, and I told the bosun I'd have tea out of the sea itself before I let them sulk.

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There was one bag left. Only one, folded in the bottom of the spice tin, its string gone grey with salt and its little paper tag still legible in pencil. Ada's last letter had come aboard at Valparaiso and I'd read it aloud to nobody, the way you do when you're lonely at the stove. I steeped that bag in the red cup for Captain Lusk, who hadn't spoken a word since the squall off Cape Pilar, and I set it on the chart table with the tag hanging over the rim.

He drank it standing up, every drop, the way a man does when he's been told his tea is a sacrament and doesn't believe a word. Then he dried the tag on his sleeve, read the pencilled name, and laughed for the first time in a month. Nobody on that deck ever learned what the joke was. I've never asked.

The tag went up the mizzen that evening, pinned to the rigging like a flag. It's still there, if the weather hasn't had it, and if you're ever aboard the Quill and see a scrap of paper snapping about in the wind, you'll know it's the last tea of the voyage, and that I was the one who made it.