Small black cat silhouette tattoo on a lower leg, with a purple butterfly and a smaller blue butterfly above it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat silhouette with two butterflies on a leg

Calf · Mixed · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a cat sits with its back to the viewer, looking up towards two butterflies. The butterflies are flat fills, one purple and one smaller blue, placed to the upper left and upper right of the cat. The pale skin and plain black background make the colours and simple outlines stand out clearly.

Calf Cat Silhouette Butterfly

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had been sitting on the flat roof of the granary since the dew dried, and my father swore she was waiting for the harvest tally to finish so she could claim her share of the mice. I told him she was watching the butterflies. There were two that year, one dark blue as the river at dusk and one the purple of crushed mulberry, and they rose from the reed beds every morning and circled the threshing floor as if they had business there.

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We called her Meret, after the grandmother who kept cats in the house before us. She did not chase the butterflies. She only lifted her head, her ears turning one after the other, and followed them with the patience of a scribe copying a long list. When the blue one settled on the rim of the water jar, she shifted her weight back onto her haunches and let her tail curl around her paws, and I saw my brother Khnum in the doorway, his hands still grey with the clay he had been kneading all morning.

Khnum was trying to paint a bowl for the temple of the new moon, and he could not get the wings right. Every version he made came out too heavy, or too still. "Look at her," I said. "She isn't waiting to eat them. She's just glad they came back." He laughed and said it was the worst reason to keep a cat he had ever heard, but he set down his brush and watched with me.

When the butterflies rose again over the granary wall, Meret did not follow them into the yard. She stayed where she was, tail wrapped round her feet, looking up at the empty air as if the colours were still hanging there. Khnum finished the bowl that evening, with the purple wing a little wider than it should have been. He said it was the only honest thing he had made all year.