Upper arm tattoo of a brown cat head with a blue eye and a pink rose, set in pink and blue washes with black ink splatters and cracked linework.

Cat and rose watercolour sleeve on an arm

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A cat's head in brown tones with a pale blue eye sits above a pink rose on the upper arm, with the rose toward the lower part of the frame. Soft pink and blue washes fade out at the edges, while black lines run down the arm like cracks and scatter into ink splatter dots. The person wears a white sleeveless top, and the tattoo fills most of the arm with the image cropped near the elbow.

Upper arm Cat Rose Ink splatter Crack

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the Hollin Pass road by Tuesday, and by Thursday the only guests were a surveyor who snored and a widow who paid in shillings she counted twice. The cat arrived on the Friday, slipping out of a crack in the back parlour wall as if the plaster had decided to let something through.

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It was brown, the colour of stewed tea, with one pale blue eye, and it watched me the way the old landlady, Mrs Ashdown, used to watch a bill she had no intention of paying. Behind the settle, under three coats of distemper, was the rose she had painted the summer her husband went off to the mill towns. Pink washes had bled into the plaster, and the cracks she never bothered to fill ran down from it like ink dropped into water.

I found her paint box in the cellar, tucked behind a cider barrel, the cakes of blue still soft when I breathed on them. I did not mean to repaint anything. I only wanted to see whether the rose would open if I wet the brush. It did, slowly, petal by petal, and when I looked up the cat had gone, leaving a single black spot on the sill where it had been sitting.

The thaw came in April. The surveyor left, the widow left, and the parlour wall was clean except for one faint blue smudge where something had once washed its paw. I still set a saucer out each evening, and the crack beside the settle stays open just wide enough for the rose to breathe.