Colour Japanese style tattoo of a black and white cat with red peonies, teal leaves and black clouds on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and peonies on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black and white cat with closed eyes curls around the forearm, its tail sweeping down beside three red peony blooms with dark teal-green leaves. Black shaded clouds fill the space behind the cat and the flowers. Bold black outlines and solid colour fills give a traditional Japanese look, and the design wraps around the curve of the arm.

Japanese Forearm Cat Peony Flower Leaves Cloud Paw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came to Master Okuda's lacquer shop the winter the Kamo river froze, and she never once looked at the bowls she was paid to guard. She went straight to the wet screen where the peonies were drying, sat down in front of them, and shut her eyes as if she were listening to something far off. I was nineteen and grinding vermilion for the third year running, and I thought she was simply stupid with cold.

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The master was not a patient man, but he let her stay. He painted the three red blooms first, then the dark teal leaves, and last of all the clouds, which he shaded so slowly that I thought he was waiting for the cat to wake and tell him where they should go. When the lady's steward came for the screen, Okuda had the cat's black back sketched into the lowest corner, curled around the stems with her tail falling beside the flowers, her eyes closed in the same sleep she had been keeping all winter.

The steward complained that the cat looked dead. Okuda said she was dreaming of spring and that the lady would have the only screen in Kyoto with a dreaming cat on it. The steward paid double to be rid of the argument.

That evening the cat was gone from the shop. I found her at the end of the lane, sitting on the cold step of the house where the lady lived, paws tucked under her chest. A single peony petal had stuck to her fur, red as the paint I had been grinding. I did not carry her home. I left her there, and when I walked back the snow had started to melt from the eaves, and the petal was still on her shoulder.