Fine line black outline tattoo of a cat head with whiskers above a semicolon on the inner forearm near the wrist, photographed in a tattoo studio.

Cat and semicolon on the wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a cat's head with whiskers sits above a semicolon with a curled tail, both drawn in thin black outline. The lines are even and unshaded, with the empty areas left as bare skin. The background shows a green studio wall covered with flash sheets and framed artwork, and the skin tone is the only colour on the arm.

Fine line Forearm Cat Semicolon Whiskers Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift at Carrow House has been broken since Tuesday, so you take the stairs with the cat carrier knocking against your hip, nine floors of concrete smelling of bleach and somebody's fried onions. Mrs Okonedo's cat has been missing for three days. The notice you pinned in the lobby has been torn down twice, once by the wind and once, you suspect, by Gary from flat fourteen, who says cats are the council's problem.

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You find the cat on the eleventh-floor landing, perched on the window ledge as if it is waiting for a bus. It doesn't come when you call. It looks at you the way Mrs Okonedo said it looked at the postman, as though you are a sentence it hasn't yet decided to finish. You crouch, and your knee cracks like a dropped plate, and the cat stays put, its tail curled round its feet like a hook that never quite lands.

Later you sit in her flat while the radiators knock and the kettle rumbles. She holds her tea in both hands and says the cat always stopped halfway through things: the bowl, the door, a jump onto the sofa. "It's not finished," she says. "It's only resting." When you put the cat in the carrier it goes quiet at once, and you both listen to the lift clanking back into life two floors below.

The lift is working by the time you reach the ground floor, but you take the stairs back up anyway, the carrier warm against your side and the cat's small weight settling. At her door you pin a new notice beside the old one. You write Found, then hesitate over the gap after it, and in the end you leave the line open for her to finish.