Side-by-side photos of an anime-style girl tattoo on a lower leg, showing the black outline stage on the left and the finished colour on the right.

Anime girl with cat creature, before and after colour

Calf · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows an anime-style girl with short auburn hair in a blue outfit, with a small winged creature perched on her shoulder and a mechanical arm at the lower edge. The left panel shows the bold black linework stage, and the right panel shows the same design with soft shading and blue, red and brown colour. Clouds fill the background, and the composition is cropped close to the limb.

Calf Creature Cloud Outline Before and after

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marit had the brass hand clamped to the workbench when Old Tobias came up the goat track, breathing like a bellows. "It's not for sale," he said before she had asked anything. "Nobody asked you to sell it," she said, and kept filing the knuckle joints. Pell, the wiry cat-thing that had come down off the crags in spring, sat on her shoulder and watched the old man with narrowed green eyes, claws hooked into her collar.

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The arm had been his brother's, fitted after a winch took two fingers at the quarry. It ran on a spring and a little steam, and it could hold a rope all afternoon without slipping. Marit had mended the glider's wing struts that March, and the ridge wind had been waiting for them ever since. "The cloud comes in off the sea at four," Tobias said. "You'll have the arm on the wrong side."

She fitted it anyway, lashing the rigging so the hand gripped the frame behind her hip. They launched at four with the cloud bank rolling up beneath them like wet wool, the village reduced to a smear of chimney smoke. Pell dug in his claws and yowled something that sounded like a laugh. Marit leaned on the brass fingers, and the glider lifted, steady as a held breath.

When they came down on the far meadow, Tobias was already walking towards them with his hands in his pockets. Marit unlatched the arm and held it out. "Keep it," he said. "It was always going to end up somewhere with a view." She pocketed the spring he had given her, and Pell, still on her shoulder, kept looking back up at the clouds as though he had left something there.