Neo-traditional style tattoo on a leg showing a black cat draped over an ornate oval frame containing a red-haired girl with X-marked eyes and a skull at the base.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat and red-haired girl in an ornate frame

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black cat with claws hooked over the top edge of an ornate oval frame, its tail curling down the right side. Inside the frame, a cartoon girl with red pigtails and black X-marked eyes wears a pearl necklace, with a skull set into the scrollwork at the bottom and striped grey shading behind her. Bold black outlines and soft grey shading sit against touches of red in the hair.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frame came into lost property on a wet Tuesday, wrapped in a tea towel and tucked under a bench on platform four. Inside was a girl with red pigtails and two black crosses where her eyes should have been, a string of pearls at her throat, and a small skull grinning up from the scrollwork at the bottom. Nobody claimed it. Harold, who ran the office before me, said people leave odd things on trains all the time, and the sensible thing is to log them and forget them.

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I logged it. Then the black cat started turning up. It sat on the ticket barrier first, then on the luggage rack of the 14:20, always on the right-hand side of the carriage, its tail curled down like a question mark. Nobody else seemed to notice it, or if they did they looked away quickly. Whenever I walked past the shelf where I'd put the frame, the cat was there on the top edge, claws hooked over the wood, watching me with eyes the colour of old pennies.

On Friday I carried the frame to the bench at the far end of the platform and left it there at closing, face to the rails. Next morning it was back on the shelf, dry as a biscuit, and the girl's crosses seemed to have turned a fraction towards the door. The cat was asleep across the top of it.

I stopped fighting it after that. Now I put the kettle on for two and leave the office door ajar, in case the cat wants to see the last train out. It always comes back before the lights go off, and the frame is always a little straighter than I left it.

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