Black and grey tattoo of a cartoon black cat with large pale eyes, sitting on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon black cat on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon black cat sits upright, facing forward with large round pale eyes, a small pink nose and open mouth, and a tail curling behind it. The tattoo uses solid dark grey fill with flat shading and clean outlines, with a few lighter highlights on the eyes. It is centred on a forearm, photographed against a plain pale background.

Forearm Cat Black cat Cartoon Eye Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On the island of Skerrow the fishwives had a saying: when the black cat comes down to the harbour wall, the boats will be home by dark. It sat with its forepaws together and its eyes round and pale as pennies, and it did not chase the gulls or wash itself like other cats. Old Mairi Tallis left a dish of salted herring on her step for it, and it never touched a scale until the last boat was tied up.

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One November the Good Intent went out past the Stacks and did not come back by dusk. Mairi's son Angus was aboard, with his bad knee and his habit of singing flat. The women gathered at the wall with lanterns while the wind swung north-east and drove rain sideways across the bay. The cat sat at the end of the wall, tail curled tight round its feet, staring at nothing. When Mairi went to lift it home, it would not be moved.

So she sat down beside it on the cold stone. Nobody talks sense to a cat, but she told it about the byre roof Angus fell through, and the goat he named after the minister, and how he had never once in thirty years said sorry first. Near midnight the cat stood, shook out its ears, and trotted down the slip into the shallows. It looked back once over its shoulder, the way a person does when they want you to follow.

Mairi followed it over the wet rocks to the north cove, where the Intent lay on her side with three men clinging to her keel. Angus was the first to see the lantern light on the water, and he swore afterwards that a black shape sat on the ledge above the surf, though no one else would say they saw it. The herring dish was empty the next morning, and it has been empty every November since.