Traditional style colour tattoo of a teacup with steam, a crescent moon and a laurel branch, with the words tea, Earl Grey, hot, on the inner forearm.

Teacup and crescent moon on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A teacup with a red diamond pattern rises into teal steam curls beneath an orange crescent moon with small radiating lines. A red and brown laurel branch curves up one side, and the words tea, Earl Grey, hot appear in black script below the cup. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills in teal, orange, red and yellow sit against a red brick wall.

Traditional Forearm Teacup Steam Crescent moon Laurel Script Tea

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain has been coming down since six, and Hollin Yard is emptying around you, awnings sagging, the last barrow man tipping water off a tarpaulin. You are the only one still under the striped canopy of the tea stall, where Mrs Oduya keeps a brass kettle going on a gas ring and sells loose leaf by the scoop. On the counter sits an old tin with a paper label in careful capitals: EARL GREY. Nobody asks for it anymore.

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"Not for sale tonight," she says, and pours you a cup anyway from a china pot with a red diamond pattern chipped at the rim. The steam climbs straight up into the lamplight and the wet wind cannot take it. Above the chimney pots a crescent moon has slipped out between clouds, thin as a fingernail, its little rays drawn in like someone who has waited a long time to be noticed. "Bergamot," she says. "Oil from a fruit that grows somewhere I've never been. My father bought the last crate off a ship at Tilbury in nineteen seventy-one and never once told anyone what he paid."

You ask her why she still keeps it. She says the man who came every Thursday, the one who wrapped a laurel branch round his bag for luck and ordered his tea hot, hot, hot, died in March, and the tin was his. She wants it drunk by someone who will finish the cup. You hold the china and it is hot enough to sting. You drink it anyway, every drop, while the rain thins to nothing and the moon brightens over the lamp posts.

She takes the empty cup, turns it so the diamonds face you again, and smiles. "Now you owe him one." You step out into the glistening street. Behind you the kettle begins to sing, and the tin stays where it is, its label catching the light.