Neo-traditional tattoo of a black cat with green eyes and a pink tongue, surrounded by cherry blossoms, on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat and cherry blossoms

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A black cat with green eyes and a pink tongue showing is the central subject, framed by pink cherry blossoms and falling petals. Bold black outlines and smooth shading define the cat's head and paws, while the blossoms use pink and red with yellow centres. The design curves across the skin in a rounded composition, with loose petals scattered around the edges.

Neo-trad Japanese Upper arm Black cat Cat Cherry blossom Petal Flower Tongue Green eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had kept the barge Marigold for eleven winters before the cat came aboard, and she never learned where it came from. It was black as a coal scuttle and sat on the coal hatch as if it had paid for the place. The lock-keeper at Hythe said it belonged to nobody, which Nell took to mean it belonged to the river.

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The cat would not come off the boat. When the spring floods came up brown and fast past Dunmere, it stood on the cabin roof with its ears flat and its green eyes narrowed at the water. Nell tied the mooring line twice and cursed the weather. The cat only opened its pink mouth and let out a sound like a rusty hinge.

Then the cherry trees along the towpath broke into flower all at once, a week early, as if someone had shaken them. Petals came down on the water and rode the current past the hull in a slow pink crowd, circling the barge and drifting against the lock gates. Nell watched them lift and settle and thought of her sister, drowned at Dunmere before Nell was born, whose name was still painted in faded letters on the bow.

The flood went down by morning. Nell found the cat asleep on the deck among the blossom, petals stuck to its black fur like sequins, and she did not move it. Some boats are kept by people, she told the lock-keeper later, and some are kept by the river, and this one had been sent a watchman.