Black tattoo of a cat silhouette whose body forms a treble clef, with a long thin curling tail, on the side of a torso beside black and white striped clothing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and treble clef on the side

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black cat silhouette where the body is shaped as a treble clef, with a long, thin tail curling up and to the left. The solid black areas contrast with the fine tail line, and the design sits on warm, lightly tanned skin. Black and white striped fabric runs along the bottom of the frame.

Ribs Cat Treble clef Music Silhouette Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat would not come in from the forest edge until the last verse was finished, so Mabel Crane stood at her door with the milk going cold and waited for the wood to give him back. He was Hesketh's cat, and Hesketh had been the village fiddler until the autumn he walked into the pines after a tune and did not walk out.

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Everyone said the tune was still in there, caught between the trunks where the light went green and thin. The cat had gone in after it every evening since. Mabel had seen him from the lane, sitting very upright on a fallen larch, his body bent into the old shape Hesketh used to draw on the slate for the children: a tall curl with a round heart at the bottom, like the letter he had called the high key. His tail rose up and to the left, thin as a bootlace, and it moved as though it were keeping time.

She went out with her apron on and her hands smelling of onions. She did not know the fiddle music, so she hummed the only thing she had, the washing song her mother had sung over the copper. The cat's tail stopped. Then it curled again, slower, and the pines seemed to lean in to listen, and from somewhere deep under the needles came the sound of a bow drawn long across a string.

She carried him home against her shoulder, and he purred all the way down the lane. The next morning there was a line of small black marks drawn in the dust of her step, rising and falling in a shape she recognised, and beside them, in the cat's careful hand, the first bar of the washing song.