Black and grey botanical sleeve on a shoulder and upper arm, with a realistic cat portrait among leaves, vines and flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and botanical sleeve on shoulder

Botanical · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo covers the shoulder and upper arm with a cat portrait, its green eyes the only touch of colour, looking to the side. Around it sit broad leaves, trailing vines, small flowers and berries drawn in fine black linework with soft grey shading. The composition wraps from the upper back across the arm, with the cat set near the centre of the arm and the foliage filling the surrounding space.

Botanical Realism Shoulder Upper arm Cat Leaves Vine Flower Berry Foliage Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Come closer, the sparrows will want the seed I've put out, so mind your feet. Thirty summers I kept the physic garden below the temple steps, and in all that time the cat never once asked me for anything. She came with the first frost, a grey-striped thing with eyes like the green glass the traders bring up from the coast, and she sat on the wall where the bryony grew and watched me work.

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The priests wanted the garden for their remedies. They sent a boy each spring to count the leaves, and each spring the leaves had gone. Snails, they said. Rats. But I saw the rats leave when she came down from the wall, and the boy stopped counting the day he found her sitting in the middle of the mint with her tail wrapped round her paws, as if she had been planted there herself.

On the last night of the dry month the boy came running with a torch, shouting that the temple stores had caught. I went up with my bucket. Everyone was throwing water and nobody was looking at the vines that had climbed the storehouse wall. Only the cat was. She sat at the height of the roof with her green eyes turned toward the smoke, and wherever her gaze fell, the ivy drew back and the fire found no path to follow.