Traditional colour tattoo of a black cat with yellow eyes beside two red roses and green leaves on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat and roses on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A black cat sits in profile with its head turned towards the viewer, yellow eyes and long whiskers visible, and its tail curling at the base. Two red roses with white highlights and dark outlines frame the cat, with green leaves filling the gaps between them. Bold black outlines and solid colour fills give a flat, saturated finish against pale skin.

Traditional Forearm Cat Black cat Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat arrived on the same night the lift on Ward Six stopped at every floor. Nobody on the desk had seen it come in, but at ten past two there it was, sitting on the linen trolley outside bay four as if it had been booked in. Black all over, with a rust-coloured smudge on one flank and yellow eyes that followed the drip stands. Mrs Okafor said she would not be the one to move it.

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Dennis Ruddle, the porter, said it belonged to the florist's across the car park, the one with buckets of red roses stacked by the bins. Dennis had worked nights for nineteen years and believed in very little, but he believed in cats. He lifted it down, and it walked straight back up onto the trolley and sat with its tail curled round its paws, watching the double doors.

At quarter to four a bed alarm sounded in bay four and I ran with the crash trolley, and for twenty minutes there was nothing in my head but numbers and the next thing to do. When I came back past the desk the cat had moved to the sill beside the window. There was a rose on the sill too, red, with its outer petals browning at the edges. Dennis swore it had not been there at midnight, and the florist's bins were locked.

By the time the sky went grey over the multistorey, the man in bay four was sleeping properly for the first time since he came in. The cat had gone. The rose stayed on the sill, and I left it there, because some things on a night shift are better not explained before the day staff arrive.