Small black and grey dotwork tattoo of a black cat sitting on a stack of books on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat sitting on stacked books

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a black cat seated in profile with its tail curled upward, perched on a stack of three books with one open page. The cat and books are built from fine stippled dots, giving soft tonal shading and texture. The design is centred on a plain, pale section of inner upper arm against a softly blurred indoor background.

Dotwork Upper arm Cat Black cat Book Open book

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mice had found the third shelf again, and Chremes swore by his mother's grave that he would drown the lot in the cistern before the inspectors came up from Alexandria. I did not argue. From the ledge above the copyists' tables I watched the grey shapes slip between the rolls of papyrus and thought that a man who spent his days counting letters ought to be more grateful for a cat who could count mice.

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The boys who scrub the floors call me Mistress Ink, because I sleep on the stacked codices in a black heap and leave the pages smelling faintly of me. The truth is I like the warmth they keep. Damp comes off the harbour in the winter and softens anything left lying on the floor, so I took to sitting on the top book of each pile, a square of waxed board, with my tail curled round my feet as if I were the last thing a reader should dare to move.

Dorcas, the only copyist who ever scratched my ears without being asked, was working through a treatise on tides that nobody had commissioned. Each evening she left her open page beneath my weight to keep the curl out of it, and each morning I rose to find a fresh line of her hand under my flank and a pale oval where I had lain.

When the inspectors finally came they went through every shelf and found nothing amiss, except that the tide treatise had no blots and lifted from the pile without tearing. Dorcas was given a bronze coin and a new reed pen. I kept my place on the top book, and the ink beneath me stayed dark, holding the outline of a cat who had refused to move.