Traditional style colour tattoo of a teacup with yellow flowers, red roses and a banner reading Sally on a limb.

Teacup and roses with Sally banner

Traditional · Other · Colour · Photo

A teacup filled with a dark brown drink sits at the centre, decorated with yellow flowers and green leaves. Red roses and yellow blossoms surround it, with a ribbon banner at the base reading Sally. Bold black outlines and flat, solid fills of red, yellow and green give the design a classic traditional look against dark leather.

Traditional Other Teacup Rose Flower Banner Leaf Text

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The teacup had survived nine days of the Atlantic swinging in its rack above the galley sink, and Ivy Harrow had stopped flinching at every creak. It was the only good china left aboard the Marguerite Lowe, a coal steamer bound from Liverpool for Halifax, where the crew drank from dented tin mugs and the chief steward kept the teacup for herself. Mrs Pyke had handed it to Ivy on the quay with a wrapped spoon and one instruction: keep it full, and bring it back whole.

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Ivy carried it up to the wheelhouse each dawn for the second mate, Tom Asquith, who took his tea black and never once said thank you. On the tenth morning the sea lay as flat as a pewter plate, and he surprised her by asking where it had come from. She told him about the roses painted on the side, red as a fishwife's cheeks, and the yellow flowers that crept up the china as if they were trying to get out. The ribbon curled round the foot with a name written across it, Sally, and a woman in a Birkenhead junk shop had sworn the piece belonged to a girl who sailed for New York and never came back for it.

Tom said that sounded like the sort of story a steward told to stop a cabin boy crying. Then the fog came down so thick the bow disappeared, and the foghorn began its long low note. Ivy stood at the wheelhouse glass with the cup in both hands while Tom eased the throttle back. When the fog thinned at dusk, the tea had gone cold but not a drop had spilled, and the lights of Halifax stood up out of the grey like a row of lit windows. Tom reached for the cup, drained it, and set it down on the chart table with the ribbon facing up.