Back view of a full back tattoo in Japanese style, showing a large white cat framed by red and blue peonies, roses and cherry blossom.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and flowers full back piece

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A full back piece shows a large white cat with green eyes and a red-tipped ear, set among blue and red peonies, red roses, white cherry blossom and daisy-like flowers. The linework is bold and outlined, with smooth colour shading on the cat's face and petals. Bright reds, blues, greens and whites dominate across the back, and the design fills the frame from shoulder to waist.

Japanese Back Cat Peony Rose Cherry blossom Flower Daisy Back piece

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the plums are coming down tonight and I'll not shout over them. You want the story of Tomiko's cat? Then hush. She kept a white cat called Sumi in the packing shed at the bottom of the orchard, where the peonies had long since shouldered their way up through the broken crates. Sumi had one ear dipped in red, as if she'd been out in the paint pots, and green eyes that could find a wasp in a dark jar.

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That September the wind came off the hills and took half the crop before the pickers could reach it. Tomiko stood at the gate with her hands in her apron and said the trees would have to be bribed. So she took down the good blue bowl, filled it with the sweetest windfalls, and set it under the oldest tree. By morning the bowl was empty, the fruit was gone, and Sumi sat on the wall washing her face as though she had never heard of plums.

The pickers laughed. Then the magpies came, and the boys from the village, and each of them found the bowl empty as often as the wind found the branches. Tomiko began to suspect the cat was not eating the fruit at all. She followed Sumi one dusk and saw her carry each plum, one at a time, down the lane and set it on the step of the widow Hana, whose husband had gone to the sea in the spring and not come back.

Tomiko said nothing about it. She only filled the bowl again the next evening, and the next. When Hana asked why her step was sticky with gifts, Tomiko told her to ask the cat. Sumi, who had heard all of this from the wall, turned her red ear towards the orchard, yawned, and went to sleep among the roses.