A small tattoo of a white cat lying across a stack of books, with soft coloured splashes behind it and a tiny blue heart, placed on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat asleep on a stack of books

Back · Mixed · Photo

The design shows a cat with a heart-shaped marking on its face resting its head on a stack of three books, with the spines and page edges shaded in grey. The cat is drawn with clean black outlines and left largely unshaded, while the books have soft grey shading. Behind the motif, loose splashes of pink, purple, blue, green and yellow ink create a watercolour effect, and a small blue heart sits to the left.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada found the cat asleep on the logbooks again, one white paw folded over the edge of the 1911 almanac as though it had been sent up the tower to check the weather. She lifted it off with two fingers. It did not wake. It only turned its head and pressed the small dark heart on its cheek against the spine of the top volume, the one with a water stain shaped like Ireland.

Keep reading

Tom had kept the light for thirty-one years, and since March the job had been hers. The cat had come up the rock steps in a gale, soaked and furious, and Ada had told it plainly that it would not be staying. She fed it anyway. By April it had claimed the stack of books beside the brass log stand as its own, three volumes high, and she had stopped moving it.

Each night she wrote the entries in her careful hand: wind south-west, sea moderate, visibility good, one vessel passing east at ten past two. The cat sat on the books and purred against the paper, and the pages stayed warm where it lay. One evening it would not leave the top volume, so she opened it to shift it and found a note tucked in the margin in Tom's blocky capitals, dated the week before he went into hospital. IF THE CAT TAKES TO THE BOOKS, LET IT. KEEP THE BLUE INK FOR ME.

Ada sat down on the stool and read that line until the lamp came round again. Then she dipped the pen in the blue bottle, wrote beneath his words, and turned the great lens to face the dark water. In the log she put: Cat aboard. Light kept.

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