Black and grey botanical tattoo of a cat's head framed by poppies, leaves and blossoms, covering the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and botanical wreath on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cat's face looks forward at the centre of the design, drawn with fine hatched linework and stippled shading. Poppies, a five-petalled blossom, serrated leaves and small berries surround it in a loose wreath. The piece is entirely black and grey and fills the upper outer thigh against a stone wall background.

Botanical Realism Thigh Cat Flower Poppy Leaves Blossom Berry Strawberry Wreath

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had taken the strawberry bed by the time you came up the lane with the barrow, and she did not get up for you. Her name was Ninepence, after the coin Captain Harrow paid the boy who found her in the hold of the Mary Jane, and she sat in the middle of the rows as though they had been laid out around her on purpose.

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Walled gardens in Porthcarrow were built against the wind, so everything in them grew low and stubborn: the poppies that seeded along the lane, the blackberries that climbed the south wall, the wild strawberries Mrs Penhale swore were sweeter than anything sold on the quay. You were paid four shillings a week to weed them, and another two to keep the cat off the fruit. You had failed at both for a month. Every time you bent to pull a dock root, she looked up at you with that flat, unhurried stare, and you found yourself apologising to her.

Mrs Penhale died in her chair on the first Sunday of June, with the window open on the harbour. The house went to a man from Bristol who wanted the wall down for a car park. On the last morning you went up to fetch your tools and found Ninepence on the gatepost with a folded paper weighted under one paw. In a looping hand it said that the strawberries were never meant for selling, only for the cat, and that a gardener who could not keep a cat off them could at least be trusted to carry her home.

You lifted her into the barrow the way you would lift a sack of seed. She let you. At the bottom of the lane she stood up on the harbour wall and turned her head back toward the walled garden, where the poppies were already shedding onto the rows, and then she looked at you as if you were the one who needed telling it was time to go.