Black and grey tattoos on a pair of thighs and knees, including lace-like patterns and a snake, with a black cat lying across the lap.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black and grey thigh tattoos with a black cat

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two thighs are shown from above, covered in black and grey tattoos. Above the knees are symmetrical lace-like and geometric patterns with scalloped edges, and further down the legs sit a snake and an insect-like motif. A black cat lies across the lap, and a hand rests on it beside a wristwatch with a black strap, all set on a beige carpet.

Blackwork Traditional Thigh Forearm Cat Snake Insect Lace Geometric Watch Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The black cat came to Hollin Bridge halt the winter the signal wires froze, and nobody at the station could say whose it was. It slept on the ticket office counter where the paraffin lamp kept the damp off, and it would not be moved for anyone but Ambrose Teel, the stationmaster, who fed it herring heads from the Friday fish van and wound his brass watch every night at ten, as his father had.

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Teel noticed that the cat liked the watch. Each morning it reached from the counter and tapped the chain where the watch hung on its hook, pushing until the watch swung against the lace-edged cloth beneath it. Teel took this for a hint about the time, and he was right, though not in the way he thought. One November the cat lay down across the points at the far end of the platform, and a grass snake, sluggish with frost, curled up beside it on the sleepers. The cat would not shift for the lamp or for Teel's voice.

Teel ran out with his lantern and found the cat with its tail flat and its eyes green in the beam, the snake still slow in the rails. He lifted the cat by the scruff, and the Eastbound came through the points he had only just set back, close enough to rattle the glass in the waiting room. Afterwards he went back inside to the counter, where the watch lay face down on the floor. It had stopped at ten to eleven, the hour he should have wound it, and it was the cat that had pushed it off the hook to wake him.

Teel never again forgot to wind the watch, and the cat never again let him.