Black ink tattoo of a stretching cat with a curled tail and a trail of paw prints running up a shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and paw prints on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A stretched cat silhouette with a tall, curled tail sits below a trail of four small paw prints that rise towards the top of the shoulder. The linework is solid black with simple, smooth outlines and no visible shading, and the cat's face has minimal detail. The image is a close crop of bare skin with a red strap running down the left edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had come aboard at Brentford with the coal, and nobody on the Ada Mae could say whose she was. Dad called her Sixpence because she charged us sixpence a night in mice, and she paid up every time.

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Our cargo that winter was bricks bound for a yard past Hanwell, and the cut froze hard enough to walk on by the third morning. Sixpence went ahead of us along the towpath, tail up like a question mark, testing each patch of ice with one paw. Behind her she left a trail of prints in the rime, four neat pads and the little dab of the toes, and I counted them to keep my fingers warm while I pushed the pole.

On the fourth morning the prints stopped at the lock gates. Dad went up the bank shouting her name, and I stood on the cabin roof with the frost cracking under my boots. I saw her sitting on the top rail of the balance beam, watching the black water beneath the ice where something large had come up to breathe. She didn't look at us. She had found the one thing on the cut that was still moving.

We got her back by dusk, curled on the coal sacks with her tail wrapped over her nose. Dad said she'd been looking for a way home for us all along, which was the kind of thing he said when he was tired. Next morning I walked the towpath before anyone was up, and her prints were still there, leading back the way we'd come, four to a row, right up to the cabin step.

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