Black and grey tattoo on a back shoulder area showing a solid black cat sitting on a crescent moon filled with Celtic knotwork, with swirling vines, leaves and flower buds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat on a Celtic moon with vines

Botanical · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black cat sits on the lower curve of a crescent moon, with its tail trailing down the outside of the shape. The moon is filled with interlaced Celtic knotwork, while vines with heart-shaped leaves, curling tendrils and two flower buds extend to the right. The tattoo is rendered in black ink and grey shading on pale skin, with bold silhouette against fine linework.

Botanical Back Cat Moon Celtic knot Vine Leaves Flower Swirl Crescent

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat was already sitting on the moon when we reached the Gallow Ford checkpoint, a black shape on the painted crescent that hung over the customs hut like a sign nobody had bothered to take down. My sister Nessa said the guards kept it up as a joke for the smugglers. I said nothing. I had our grandmother's knot cloth folded inside my coat, the one stitched with interlacing that never quite closes, and the officer's torch was already sliding over the boot of our car.

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He asked where we were bound, and Nessa told him a christening in Drumlorcan, which was true as far as it went. He asked what was in the parcel on the back seat. It was a bundle of vine cuttings wrapped in wet newspaper, bramble and rose and the little heart-leaved honeysuckle that only grows on the far bank of the river. Gran had made us promise to carry them over before the first frost, because the vines would not take on the wrong side, and nobody in the family had ever explained why that mattered.

The officer lifted the newspaper, sniffed, and set it down again. Then he looked up at the sign and grinned. 'Your cat's facing the wrong way,' he said. We looked. The black cat had turned its head south, towards us, its tail hanging down past the last loop of knotwork. 'She's always been awkward,' Nessa said, and he waved us on without another word.

We drove in silence until the road dipped to the river. When I looked back, the moon was empty, the cat gone off it into the honeysuckle, and a green tendril had already pushed out through the wet newspaper towards the water. The cat had only ever wanted to cross, and so, it seemed, had we.