Small colour tattoo of a cartoon cat in a polka dot dress and red bow, holding an open orange book by a thin line, on the lower leg above the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cartoon cat holding an orange book on ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A small cartoon cat character wearing a red bow and a red polka dot dress is shown holding a thin string that lifts an open orange book. The linework is thin and dark, with flat fills of orange, red and pink and small white highlights left in the skin. The design sits centrally on a pale, lightly lit lower leg against a dark grey background.

Fine line Ankle Cat Book Bow String Cartoon character

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The string came in through the reading room window on a Tuesday, tugged by a wind off the harbour, and it had a book on the end of it. Mrs Ogilvie, who had run the lost property shelf at Harbourside Library since before the decimalisation of the coinage, saw it first and called me over with the particular sniff she kept for things that were not her fault.

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The book was small and orange, its pages fanned open like a hand of cards someone had dropped. Tied to the other end of the string was a cat no bigger than my thumb, in a spotted red frock with a bow the size of a bee. It was drawn, not real, and it would not let go. Every time we tried to unhook the string it kicked its little feet in the air and hung on, regarding us with the blank patience of a thing that has never once been late for anything.

We kept it on the windowsill for three days. The cat read nothing, but each morning the book had opened a little further, as though someone at the far end of the string were turning the pages with great care. On Friday a boy from the ferry queue came in with a torn card and asked for a title nobody had heard of. The cat floated down, dropped the string into his open palm, and looked at Mrs Ogilvie as if to say she had been very slow about it.

She stamped the return slip with a date three weeks off and handed it to him. Up went the cat past the ceiling fans, its frock flaring, and out through the open sash the string went, unspooling over the harbour wall the way it had come.