Coffee and my Tattoo

My writing assignment: Write about Coffee

My tattoo came about from a cup of coffee. It was college finals week, or maybe it was the year after I graduated. I was in the coffee shop on E Street in Davis. At that time it was dingy and grey and filled with caffeinated students. The dark coffee yin-yanged nicely with the white thick cups. The place smelled of cigarette-drenched clothing, nervous energy, and layers of espressos and cappuccinos.

I carefully took the almost full mug to the make-it-lighter station--half and half, whole milk, non-fat milk, sugar. I didn't drink soy milk at the time so I didn't ask for it. Coffee is truly best with the thickest milk product available, soothed down to the color of a muddy river after a hard rain.

For weeks I had been pondering what tattoo design to have etched onto my body for all time. The soft area just above and to the left of my hip was the canvas, but no image had appeared that inspired me. Until the coffee. And the cream.

It was one of those life moments when everything stops. The talking, the blare of the espresso machine, my thoughts. As I poured the half and half I dreamily stared into the deep depths of my coffee. As whiteness touched darkness some mysterious dance caused the cream to swirl into a tiny spiral at the center of the cup and then swirl out to create four perfectly spaced wavy lines at right angles to each other. My being took a multi-dimensional snap shot--my arm holding the half and half pitcher high, the light through the windows behind me, tables and chairs and bodies and dark, roasted beans. I became all of them. Everything was sweetly connected and the world clicked into focus, not as something separate from me, but a tapestry I was woven into with the finest artistic touch. When you step back you can see the whole picture emerge from seemingly separate threads.

The cream dissolved into the darkness, changing it forever. But the sacred design coffee and cream created stayed with me--the spiral of change surrounded by the four directions. I drank the holy cup. Later I breathed through the needle that irrevokably inked dark blue cream onto my cafe au lait skin, where it continues to remind me that revelation can come in a coffee cup.