Colour tattoo of a black and white cat stretching over a blue skeletal cat on the calf, in a Japanese-inspired neo-traditional style.

Black and white cat with skeletal cat on a calf

Japanese · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black and white cat stretches diagonally down the calf, with its front paws reaching up and its head at the lower end of the design. Behind it, a pale blue skeletal cat with a skull-like head and visible ribs is outlined in bold black linework, and a partial leafy botanical tattoo is visible at the left edge. Solid black fills, white highlights and a red-tinged shadow around the outline give the piece a bold, graphic finish, with blue and green as the main accent colours.

Japanese Neo-trad Other Cat Skeleton Skull Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The orchard at Hollin Farm had forty old trees, and by the last week of August the windfalls lay so thick in the long grass that the wasps had stopped bothering to hide. Ada Venn kept a black and white cat called Sukey who had been a fine mouser in spring, but by harvest she had grown fat and sleepy and would not stretch for anything above the height of a hen.

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The old folk said the orchard had a second cat. Under the oldest tree, the Bramley that had dropped its fruit on the lane since before the wall was built, lay the bones of a cat that somebody's grandmother had buried in a flour sack. On still evenings the bones got up. They were pale blue, the way the mere looks before rain, and they walked the rows with their ribs showing and their skull grinning. Nobody who saw it ran. They only left a saucer of milk on the step and kept their doors shut.

One evening Ada found Sukey stretched along the lowest bough of the Bramley, reaching with both forepaws for a single red apple that hung just out of reach. The blue cat sat in the grass below, watching. Ada was about to shout when it rose, arched its long back until the bones clicked, and leapt. Its skull came level with the bough, and the apple dropped into Sukey's paws, and the two of them tumbled down into the windfalls together.

Sukey came home that night with her fur smelling of cold earth. The blue cat was gone. In the morning there was a single apple on the back step, bitten clean on one side, and the saucer of milk had been licked dry.