Close-up of a Japanese-style tattoo of a black cat with yellow eyes, surrounded by grey clouds and red and orange patterns, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat and clouds on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black cat with yellow eyes is shown mid-stretch, with its paws and tail curling across the design, and it has a pale, paw-printed underside. Bold black outlines and smooth shading define the cat, and grey cloud shapes with soft shading surround it. Red and orange geometric motifs run across the cat and clouds, and the design is framed against dark, plain fabric with another tattoo partly visible at the right edge.

Japanese Forearm Cat Black cat Cloud Geometric pattern Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had been aboard the Thrift longer than anyone could say, and nobody on the towpath knew where she came from. Each autumn, when the river rose brown over the path, she climbed the mast and stayed there, a black shape against the cloud, stretching until her tail hung down past the cabin roof. Mabel Crowe and her brother Ned had long since stopped asking her to come down.

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That year the storm came off the flats at dusk with a red fork of light in it. Ned shouted from the tiller as the cat went up the rigging hand over hand, a coil of red thread caught between her paws, which she must have carried from the lock-house. She looked back once, yellow-eyed, and wound the thread round the mast-iron the way you would tie off a mooring. Then the lightning came down the thread and went quiet.

The wind dropped. The clouds slid down the mast like wool off a spindle and lay grey on the water. When the sky cleared, the storm had been gathered into her stripes, orange and red, bent sharply at every joint. She came down the stays with two round brass wheels rattling at her flanks, sat on the coaming, and washed a paw as if nothing had happened.

After that Ned never tied the Thrift to the bank in a storm. Every autumn the wheels went missing from the lock gate, and every spring they were back, polished and warm. Mabel kept the cat's bowl full and never asked where the storms went.