Colour tattoo of a teacup with steam and a teal floral pattern resting on a stack of three shaded books, placed on the outer thigh.

Teacup on a stack of books on a thigh

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A stack of three hardback books, the top one red, sits beneath a patterned teacup and saucer with teal floral detail and curling steam. The books are shaded to suggest depth and page edges, with a soft grey shadow beneath them. The tattoo fills the thigh, shown from a slightly angled phone photograph, with a person in blue shorts beside it.

Thigh Teacup Book Stack of books Steam Saucer Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last ferry to Inchgarve was cancelled, so the shop stayed open late, which is how I came to be sitting on the counter with Hetty Laird and her three unsold hardbacks. The top one was red cloth, its spine gone soft as bread. She had stacked them the way her mother stacked tins, biggest at the bottom, and set her grandmother's teacup on the lot as if it were a plinth.

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The cup was patterned with a ring of teal flowers and chipped on the handle, and she filled it from the kettle every half hour without once drinking from it. 'Your father sold me this,' she said, 'the week before the mainland bookbinder shut. He said a book wants a cup of tea to keep it company, or it gets lonely on a shelf.' Steam curled off the rim and drifted past the window, where the rain had turned the harbour into a grey mirror.

I asked why she was keeping the stack when the boat would bring a dozen new copies in March. She lifted the cup, looked at the faded gold inside the saucer, and said the books were not for selling. Each one had a name written on the flyleaf in pencil: her husband, her brother, and a third she would not read aloud. Some things a shop keeps because it needs something it does not sell.

She let me take the red one for a pound, the cup and saucer staying on top of it as if they had always belonged there. Outside, the ferry sounded at last, a long low note over the water, and I carried the stack down to the pier in a paper bag, the tea still warm beneath my arm. I never did learn the third name.