Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a seated cat on a stack of books, placed on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat sitting on a stack of books

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black cat sits upright with its tail curling up behind it, perched on a stack of books with one open book lying across the pile. The cat is solid black with fine stippled texture, while the books are outlined and shaded with dots and short lines. The design is black and grey, centred on pale skin against a softly blurred indoor background.

Dotwork Upper arm Cat Black cat Book Stack of books Open book Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The returns trolley is the first thing you learn to distrust in Harrow Dean, because it is never empty when you come in at seven. Mrs Vosper has been dead four years and her cat has not noticed. You find him on the stack again, one paw tucked under the spine of a water-stained atlas, watching you with the flat patience of something that has read every book in the building and disapproved of most of them.

Keep reading

The forest starts at the bottom of the lane, where the bramble gives way to beech and the path becomes more rumour than path. Villagers borrow from the library and never walk past it. You do, on Thursdays, carrying the mobile crate of large-print westerns out to the woodcutters' cottages. Last Thursday the cat rode in the crate. You told yourself it was to keep the mice off the spines. He sat up on an old farmer's almanac and looked at the trees the way you might look at a debt.

At the edge of the beech there is a stile, and beyond it a clearing with a stone table where someone has left a book open to the weather. The pages have swollen into soft grey loaves. You know you should close it and leave it for the damp to finish. Instead you lift it, and the cat leaps down, pale-eyed, and walks into the trees without looking back, tail up like a question mark.

When you return with the crate that evening, the trolley has gained one volume, its cover blank and cold. You open it. Every page is a list of names in a careful hand, and the last line is yours, with today's date beside it, marked as returned.