Black and grey dotwork and traditional tattoo on a forearm showing a stormy wave and sailing ship inside a patterned teacup, with a rain cloud above.

Teacup with a storm at sea on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A rain cloud sits above a patterned teacup and saucer, with rain dashes falling towards it. Inside the cup, a dotted and shaded wave rises around a three-masted sailing ship. The linework is bold and the shading uses stippled dots, with floral detail on the cup, and the design is set centrally on the forearm.

Traditional Dotwork Forearm Teacup Saucer Wave Ship Cloud Rain Flower Sea Storm

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain came down over Brindley Street market at half past four, and the tea stall's awning sagged under it like a wet sail. You had the kettle on its third boil before the first customer ran in, shaking water off a borrowed newspaper. Tobi Okafor wanted two teas and an argument about whether the football was finished. You gave him both, and a biscuit he hadn't paid for.

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Your grandmother's cups hung on a row of hooks behind you, the good ones, bone china with a band of flowers that had worn to ghosts. She sold tea from that stall for forty years and never broke a cup, though she swore the rain got into the glaze and made everything taste faintly of the sea. You had laughed at her for it. Then a gust tore the awning loose, water came slopping off it in a sheet, and the blue-patterned cup on the top hook rattled once, the way a hull shudders when a wave lifts it.

You took it down. Inside, the tea had gone dark, and a grey swell was rolling across it though nothing had touched it. A three-masted ship climbed the rim with its sails full, and somewhere at the bottom of the cup a man was shouting for a rope. Behind you the market lights went out one stall at a time, and the rain kept falling in thin dashes, straight as thread, toward the saucer in your hands.

You set the cup on the counter carefully, the way you would set down a letter you had not finished reading. Tobi tapped the wood. "Two pound, is it?" You didn't answer. In the cup the little ship had turned for home, and the storm was already loosening its grip on the sea.