Close-up of a small solid black cat tattoo on the outer rim of an ear, shown in a simple blackwork silhouette style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat tattoo on the ear

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small black cat with an arched back, raised tail and a white highlight in its eye is tattooed along the outer rim of the ear. The cat is rendered as a solid black silhouette with smooth edges and no shading, and the ink is set against the pale skin of the ear and the dark hair behind it. The image is a tight, centred close-up with even lighting.

Blackwork Other Cat Animal Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came up the back stairs of Hollin Bank Hospital the winter the boiler failed, and nobody on nights could say who had let it in. Sister Doreen Pyke said it belonged to the porter. The porter said it belonged to her. It walked the ward at two o'clock with its back bowed and its tail held high like a question mark somebody had forgotten to finish, and it stopped beside anyone who was going to die before morning.

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Doreen learned to watch for the arch. When the cat stood in the doorway of bay three with its spine curved and one pale eye fixed on a bed, she did not ring for the registrar. She drew the curtain, fetched the chair from the sluice room and sat down with the patient's hand in hers. The cat would climb onto the blanket by the feet and wait, quite still, as if it were keeping a place in a queue.

One night in February it stopped at bed six, where a retired signalman called Walter Greave lay with his teeth in a glass and his breath going in slow rolls. Doreen sat down. The cat arched. She said, 'Not yet, you've no business here,' and it gave her the look the night sister gave a houseman who had mislabelled a drip, then dropped off the bed and went out past the lift doors, tail up, without hurry.

Walter woke at six and asked for tea. He lived another eleven years and never once mentioned the cat, though every February after that Doreen left the ward door propped open an inch, in case.