Black cat silhouette tattoo on the upper back, with pink, blue, yellow and green paint-like splashes trailing behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat with watercolour splashes on the back

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A solid black cat in mid-stride faces right, with its tail raised in a curl, drawn as a filled silhouette with soft grey shading. Loose, streaked splashes in pink, blue, yellow, green and orange trail behind the cat and fade out at the edges. The tattoo sits on smooth skin against a blue fabric edge at the top left of the frame.

Back Cat Black cat Paint splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came over the wall of the drying yard at dusk with its tail hooked up like a question mark, and I knew from the way it moved that someone had spilled the good ochre again. Nobody on Carrow Terrace keeps cats any more. The grain ships took the last of the mousers in the great cull, and the orbital tallies called it a sensible use of protein. This one was black as a boot, though, and it had been somewhere it shouldn't. Trailing behind it, hanging in the still air, were ribbons of colour: pink, a sour blue, yellow, and the green of new bean shoots.

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Colour is a ration here. Each month the Commons issue the guilds a single cartridge of dye, and the rest of us live under the grey of the sky-lamps. I have spent eleven years grinding madder and bluebell into paste for the cloth-houses, and I have never once seen colour run loose through the air like that. It thinned at the edges the way breath does in cold. The cat stopped under my lamp, looked at me with eyes that did not care, and began to wash one paw as if it had only walked through a wet garden.

I followed the streaks to the old reservoir, where the cisterns had been left to crust over. The cat led me along a line of spilled colour to a cistern lid pried loose, and beneath it sat a crate of sealed pigment jars, dated before the Quiet. Someone had hidden a whole summer down there. I took one jar, and the cat took the rest of the evening, slipping back up the ladder as though it had always owned the place.

By morning the whole terrace knew, though nobody reported the jars. The loom-girls began dyeing their threads in shades no ration had ever allowed, and the cat was seen crossing the drying yard with its tail curling higher every day. I still keep my jar on the sill, unopened, because I think the cat knew exactly what it was carrying, and I would rather be the one who kept it than the one who spent it.