Colour traditional tattoo of a black and white cat curled around two red roses with green leaves, on a lower leg.

Cat and roses in a traditional style on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Colour · Photo

A black and white cat stretches along the skin, its head turned to the right with whiskers and a small open mouth, and its paws and tail wrapping around two red roses. Bold black outlines and smooth shading in pink, red and dark green fill the leaves, petals and cat's fur. The design is centred on the limb with the cat's body forming a loose arc across the composition.

Traditional Calf Cat Rose Leaves Paw Tail Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and mind the third stair, it has never forgiven anybody. The keeper's wife, Ada Pennock, kept roses against the lee wall because the salt would not let them grow anywhere else, and every bloom she managed was a small argument she won. The cat came up with the lamp oil in the spring of the great storm, a black and white tom who arrived wet and unasked and stayed the way bad weather stays.

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He was no mouser, Ada said, he was a stretcher. Every morning he laid himself out along the garden wall like a length of washing, front paws hooked over the coping, tail coiled round the stems so nobody could cut a bloom without asking his leave. The lifeboat men called him the Admiral. He answered to nothing but the kettle and the tide bell.

The winter the supply boat failed, the keeper went down to the rocks for driftwood and did not come back before dark. Ada lit the lamp herself, climbed the iron spiral with one hand on the cold rail, and counted the steps aloud because counting kept her steady. At the hundredth step the Admiral was waiting on the landing, tail pointing up the stairwell like a finger. He led her down to the shingle and sat in the wet grass where the keeper had fallen, and he would not move until she knelt beside him.

The roses flowered red that summer, redder than anyone could account for. If you walk the coast path and find a cat stretched across a garden wall, don't call him lazy. He is keeping the bloom, and the light, and the man who came home on the morning tide.