Two colour tattoos on an upper arm: a blue and black teacup with roses and symbols beneath it, and a realistic frog on a blue and gold gothic shield.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Teacup and frog tattoos on an arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The top photograph shows a teacup with a dark liquid surface and blue roses on the saucer, with a row of dark symbols and numerals below it. The lower photograph shows a realistic brown frog perched on a blue, gold-outlined gothic window panel set inside a shield shape. Both use outlined linework with shading, with blue as the main colour and small touches of brown and grey.

Neo-trad Realism Upper arm Teacup Rose Frog Shield Symbol Number

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, the tea's still warm and I'll not have it going cold over a bride's nerves. Aunt Dorcas poured from the chipped pot that had come over from Hull in a hatbox, and she tipped the cup three times the way her mother had taught her, so the leaves would settle against the blue roses on the saucer. Nobody at the breakfast had asked for a reading. That was never the point with Dorcas.

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The leaves had gone down thick and black as pit dust, and she turned the cup slowly, frowning. There's a shape in it, she said. The choirboy swore it was a wolf. I told him it was a window. An old one, the sort with pointed arches and little blue panes, and sitting square in the middle of it, large as life, a frog with its chin up, as if it had been waiting all afternoon for the vicar to finish his sums.

Now, you'll want to know about the frog. It came up out of the vestry drain the Tuesday before the banns were read, and it sat on the sill of the north window and would not be shifted by broom or hymnbook. Old Mr Pryce from the bell tower said it was the parish's own, come to see the family line through. The number carved over the pew, three nine nought, was the year the first Hollins married in that church, and the runes beside it are only the initials of a girl who ran off to sea with the frog's ear in her pocket. Don't ask me how I know. The cup knows.

So drink up. The frog has gone back under the vestry door, and the bride's name is in the leaves now, sat right where the roses are. Let the young ones dance. Nobody in this room is going to be sorry they stayed for the tea.