Colour tattoo of a black cat with a raised paw among roses, a lotus, poppies and a blue butterfly on a shoulder, shown in three panels.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and flowers shoulder tattoo

Botanical · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a black cat with yellow eyes and a raised paw, seated among a large yellow flower, red roses, purple lotus-like blooms, red poppies, daisies and a blue butterfly. The linework is bold, with soft blended washes forming a watercolour-like background in turquoise, green and pink. The image is a three-panel collage of the same shoulder and upper back tattoo, with the person's skin and a grey patterned top visible at the edges.

Botanical Shoulder Cat Maneki-neko Rose Lotus Poppy Butterfly Daisy Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Marisol had wrapped the cat in three sheets of yesterday's newspaper, the way her mother used to wrap good plates, and now the customs officer at the Varnoz crossing was unwrapping it again, one fold at a time, as if something might be hiding under the print. 'Anything to declare?' he asked. 'Ceramic, a gift,' she said. He turned the figure to the strip light. The black cat sat back on its haunches, yellow eyes fixed on a point just past his shoulder, its left paw raised like a neighbour waving from a doorway. Around its base the glaze bloomed purple, lotus petals stacked like folded letters, and red poppies spilled over the rim. On the far side a small blue butterfly had been painted to look as if it had only just landed.

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Her mother had bought it from a stall in the market at Sebe the summer the back yard was all poppies. The stallholder had said the raised paw beckoned money in, but her mother had only laughed and set the cat on the kitchen windowsill facing the road, where it could keep watch over the daisies and the bees. When the house was sold, the cat had been the last thing packed, and Marisol had carried it in her lap for four hundred miles without once letting it touch the seat.

'Your mother's?' the officer asked, reading the faded sticker on the base. 'Her mother's first, then hers.' He set it down on the steel counter, paw still lifted, and for a moment neither of them spoke. Behind her a van horn sounded twice. He pressed a thumb to the butterfly's chipped wing, then nodded at the queue. 'Go on,' he said. 'Looks like it's already waving you through.'

She rewrapped the cat slowly, folding the newspaper around its body and leaving the paw free.