Two thighs: a colour budgie with roses inside an ornate black frame on the left thigh, and a black and grey sketch of a cat with glasses reading on the right thigh.

Budgie in a frame and a bespectacled cat on thighs

Thigh · Mixed · Photo

The left thigh shows a green and yellow budgerigar perched on a branch with pink and red roses, enclosed in an oval black filigree frame. The right thigh carries a loose black and grey sketch of a cat wearing round glasses and a hat, seated behind an open book with a quill and inkpot beside it. The linework is bold and detailed on the left, with soft shading on the cat, and the two tattoos sit side by side against a plain floor and seat.

Thigh Rose Flower Frame Cat Glasses Book Quill

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Penhallow had kept the lamp at Scarrow Head for nineteen years, and for most of them her only company was a budgerigar called Pip. He could say "kettle" and "mind the step" in a voice like a rusted gate, but he could not say the one name she wanted to hear, which was her brother's. Tom had gone out on the Mary Jane the winter the new light went up, and the sea had kept him.

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The cat arrived in the autumn, a grey tom with round wire spectacles that the fishermen swore he had stolen from a vicar. He liked to sit on the logbook as though checking the weather entries for mistakes. Ada kept an inkwell on the sill because the Board wanted the tide written out by hand every hour, and the cat watched her pen with the solemn attention of a clerk. Some nights she read him Tom's old letters aloud, and Pip sat on the curtain rail with his head on one side, listening.

On the first night of the spring gales she wrote a letter she had no way of posting, addressed to nobody, and folded it into the drawer beneath the barometer. Hours later, when the glass was rattling in its frame, she heard Pip speaking in the dark, clear as a bell. "Tom. Tom, mind the step." She sat very still. Then the cat leapt onto the desk, knocked the inkwell over, and walked a neat line of blue prints across the page.

In the morning the sea had gone flat and grey. Ada found the letter smeared with paw marks that looked, if she squinted, like a row of small, careful letters. She pinned it to the wall beside the cage, and the cat settled on the logbook to supervise, and the light went on turning above them until the sun came up over the water.