Black script reading Bad Kitty with a paw print and pink watercolour splashes on a forearm, with a tabby cat resting beside it.

Bad Kitty script and paw print on a forearm

Lettering · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A close photograph of a forearm showing black script lettering that reads Bad Kitty, with a cluster of dark paw print dots to the right. Soft pink watercolour-style splashes sit behind the lettering and paw print, and a tabby cat with green eyes lies in the background on the left.

Lettering Forearm Cat Tabby cat Paw print Script lettering Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Tancred had been lettering the board above the tea rooms in Holloway Quay for three days when the tabby came in through the open door and walked straight through the pink. She had mixed that pink herself, rose madder cut with white, and it was the only colour the sign needed for the splashes she planned behind the black letters. The cat did not care. It stepped into the pot, shook one foot, and left a row of perfect dark prints across the cloth on the trestle.

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The cat belonged to nobody in particular, which the village said was the cat's own arrangement. The fishermen called it Sprat, the vicar's wife called it Lady Muck, and the dressmaker's boy, who had watched it carry off an entire kipper from the fish slab, called it Bad Kitty, because he had read the words on a biscuit tin. Mabel found herself crouched on the step at dusk, rag in hand, watching the paw marks dry while the cat sat on the windowsill and washed a leg with great dignity.

Her commission was for the Quayside Trust, which wanted something cheerful for the new tearoom. Her sketch had been polite: gulls, a teapot, a loop of ribbon. She tore it up. In the morning she painted the cat's footprints in black across the lower corner of the board, then lettered BAD KITTY in the copperplate her father had taught her, the loops of the B curling round the prints like a hand around a warm cup.

When the Trust came to see it, the chairman frowned at the words, then at the cat asleep on the counter beneath them. "It isn't what we ordered," he said. Mabel said nothing. The cat opened one green eye, and the chairman, who had sat on committees for thirty years, laughed and paid her double.