Vintage Aynsley Scots Thistle Teacup and Saucer – Pattern 15287, Hand Painted Purple Thistles, Fluted Panels, Bone China England 1940s

The number pencilled under the saucer — 15287 — is Aynsley's pattern number for Scots Thistle, and it is the reason this cup can be named at all. English potteries wrote the pattern number on the saucer and left the cup's base for the painter's own mark (this one carries "C 4W" and a 31). Sellers who only flip the cup never find the number, and never learn the name.

The flower on it earned its place the hard way. Scotland took the thistle as its emblem after a night in the thirteenth century when Viking raiders crept barefoot towards a sleeping Scottish camp — and one of them trod on a thistle. His yell woke the guard. A weed with spines became a nation's badge, and later the emblem of the Order of the Thistle, Scotland's highest chivalric order. Here the thistles are scattered across cup and saucer in hand-tinted purple and green, the shading laid on by brush — you can see it deepen at the top of each head where a transfer would print flat.

The cup itself is finer than it first looks: embossed fluted panels moulded into the body, which catch the light in soft ridges; a proper footed base with a gold line; and an angular, geometric handle — the last of the Deco years rather than the usual C-scroll.

The green crown marks date it: EST 1775 flanking the crown came in from 1939, and the saucer's Bone China split either side of the crown belongs to the 1940s–50s. Hold it to a lamp and the rim glows — that is the 50% bone ash that John Aynsley II standardised, and that made English bone china what it is.

For the Scottish shelf, a Burns Night table, the Aynsley collector working by pattern number, or anyone who likes a teacup with a war story.