Photograph of a black cat tattoo walking across the upper back, with pink, orange, teal and blue watercolour-style splashes trailing behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat with watercolour splashes on back

Back · Mixed · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a cat walks left with its tail raised in a curl. Smooth black shading gives the body form, and loose pink, orange, yellow, teal and blue splashes spread out behind it like wet paint. The cat sits centrally on a pale, slightly freckled area of skin, with the colour bands fading toward the edges.

Back Cat Black cat Paint splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Okonedo's cat had no business on the eleventh floor, but nobody on Harrow Court could say where it lived. It was black as a coal bunker, with a tail that curled over its back like a question mark, and it walked the balcony rails as though it had paid for them.

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I was holding a tin of teal when it came along the scaffold boards that Monday, pacing a line through the wet undercoat. Dev from the next crew swore at it. The cat didn't so much as flick an ear. It stepped straight through my drop cloth and out the other side, and where its paws had been the paint went up in streaks, pink then orange, then a blue like the inside of a mussel shell, fanning out behind it along the whole west wall.

The council wanted the block finished in municipal grey by Friday. I stood there with the brush dripping and thought about telling the foreman, then didn't. By lunchtime half the estate had come out onto their balconies to watch the cat work its way down the building, and every splash it trailed stayed put, drying bright against the concrete while the grey crept round it.

When the inspector came on Thursday he stood in the car park with his clipboard for a long time. Then he wrote something down, tore off the sheet, and asked who was responsible for the colour. Mrs Okonedo pointed at the cat, asleep on the bottom step in a patch of sun, its tail still curled.