Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a grey cat with a pink rose and green leaves on a forearm, shown from three angles.

Cat and rose on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A grey cartoon cat with large eyes and a pink-tinted nose rests its paws on a large red rose at the bottom of the design. Green leaves, a grass-like background and pink swirled clouds fill the space around the figures. Bold black outlines and smooth colour shading are shown in three side-on photographs of the same forearm piece.

Neo-trad Forearm Cat Kitten Rose Leaves Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now shuffle up closer, because the cat on the Maudlin Rose never once came out of the cabin for anybody who hadn't brought a saucer of milk. Her name was Tansy, grey as the canal in February, and she had eyes so wide the lock-keepers swore she could see the bottom of the Trent at midnight.

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Nell Pruett painted the roses along the cabin sides every spring, all pink swirling clouds and green leaves climbing the panels like they'd been there first. The big red one on the stern locker was Tansy's, and every evening she'd hop up and sit with her front paws crossed on it, looking out over the water as if she'd paid good coin for the view. Nobody dared shift her. Not even the bargemaster, who once tried to swap the locker for a new one and came back to find the cat sulking on the towpath.

Then came the flood at Stoke Lock, the kind that lifts a boat clean off its moorings. The Maudlin Rose tugged free in the dark, and Tansy yowled from the roof like a kettle about to boil over. Ned, the lad who'd been dozing below, went along the bank with a lantern, found the mooring rope snagged on a willow, and hacked it through with his father's knife. By morning the barge had drifted two miles down to the weir, and there was Tansy, perched on her rose, paws crossed, steering nothing at all.

When they hauled her off it, the petals underneath had gone smooth and bright from all her sitting, like a hearth stone worn by feet. Nell never painted over it. She said a boat ought to keep one thing that belonged to someone, and that Tansy had only ever wanted the best seat on the water. Pass me the kettle, you lot, and mind the cat.