Traditional-style tattoo of a seated black cat with a gold ear, green eyes and a coloured collar, beside Egyptian-style hieroglyphs on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat with hieroglyphs on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A seated black cat in profile fills most of the frame, with a gold-tinted ear, green eyes and a striped coloured collar. To the left, a column of fine-line Egyptian-style hieroglyphs includes an eye motif, drawn in thin black linework. The solid black fill of the cat is contrasted with small coloured details and light outline highlights, set against healthy skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had come aboard at Port Said, wedged between two crates of onions, and by the third day out Hollis had decided she was the only officer on the Maudlin Star who knew her own mind. She sat on the galley step with her tail curled round her forepaws, watching the pans on their hooks as if they owed her money. Cook Garside said black cats were bad luck at sea and tried to shoo her with a wet cloth. She simply moved two inches and sat down again.

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On the fourth night the sea got up off Finisterre and the galley became a place of flying kettles. Hollis, braced against the range, saw that the cat had not run for the hatch with the others. She sat bolt upright on the drainboard, unmoved, her green eyes fixed on the swinging lamp. When Hollis reached for her, the collar caught the light: a band of red and green enamel, and a tin tag hanging from it, stamped with a small eye like the one painted on the lid of the onion crate.

Afterwards, when the ship had righted and the galley smelled of scorched porridge, Hollis scraped the crate's lid with his thumbnail. Under the grime ran a column of little pictures: a loaf, a reed, a pair of crossed feet, and at the bottom an eye. His mother had taught him to read the Bible by its shapes, and he thought of her now, and of how the cat had known the weather was turning before the glass did.

Garside left a saucer of cream by the range the next morning without a word. Nobody mentioned bad luck again. When the Maudlin Star came into Liverpool with every man aboard, the black cat walked down the gangway first, stopping at the bottom to look back up at the crew as if she were the one who had counted them.

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