Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a black cat with yellow eyes beneath a teal banner, framed by red roses and green leaves on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat portrait with roses on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A black cat with yellow eyes and detailed whiskers sits at the centre, with a teal banner above it bearing the word PEEPANTS. Three red roses and green leaves curve around the lower half, with gold scrollwork at the sides and top. The cat is shaded in greys and black, while the roses, leaves and ornaments use bold colour, giving a mixed palette in a tightly framed composition.

Neo-trad Realism Thigh Cat Black cat Portrait Rose Leaves Banner Scrollwork Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has got into the water trough again, and you are breaking it with the heel of your boot when the black cat drops off the hay bales and lands in the slush without a sound. Peepants, your nan called him, though nobody on the farm could say why, and the name is painted on the feed bin in letters the weather has been eating since summer. He sits on the lip of the trough and watches you the way he watches the gate, as though it owes him money.

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Uncle Dai has been gone since October. The ewes are lambing early this year, in the wrong weather, and the shed smells of iodine and wet straw. You carry a torch in your teeth and walk across the yard while the cat goes ahead, tail up, stopping every few steps to check you are still coming. Where the path meets the orchard, two roses climb the old wall, bare now, their hips shrivelled red as sealing wax.

At the shed door the cat stops, and you realise he has been leading you, not following. Inside, the ewe is down and straining. Peepants settles on the feed sack beside her with his yellow eyes fixed on your hands while you work until your fingers stop feeling like yours. The lamb comes in a slither of blood and water, breathes on the second try, and you laugh out loud in the empty shed.

Afterwards you sit on the upturned bucket by the stove with the lamb wrapped in a sack at your feet. Peepants climbs into your lap, heavy and warm, and lays his head against your wrist as if to say the job is done. Outside the gate creaks, and the frost starts again on the trough.