Black and grey tattoo of a cat lying on a stack of books, placed on the side of a woman's neck near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat asleep on stacked books at the neck

Realism · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A cat lies curled on a stack of old books, with its head resting on the top volume. The tattoo uses fine black linework and soft grey shading to show fur texture and the spines and pages of the books. It is shown in black ink only, against light skin, with the woman's hair and a denim jacket visible at the edge of the frame.

Realism Neck Cat Book Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Margaret had been told the cat was not allowed in the archive, so for three weeks she pretended not to see it. It came in through the coal hatch at the back of the basement every night around two, a grey tabby with one torn ear, and went straight to the shelf of bound annual reports from the old infirmary. It climbed onto the top volume as if it had paid for the seat.

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She never shooed it. The night porter, Desmond, said the cat belonged to nobody, which was what he said about most things he liked. Margaret kept a saucer of milk behind the microfiche cabinet and checked the ledgers for damp while the animal slept, its chin resting on a cloth spine stamped with the year 1911. Its breathing made the only sound in the room apart from the boiler.

On the last night before the records were boxed for the move to the new building, she found the stack disturbed. Someone had pulled the oldest ledgers out and laid them flat, one on another, with the cat curled at the very top like a full stop. Beneath its paws lay a register of admissions she had never been allowed to open, its pages gone soft as cloth.

She didn't wake it. She sat on the stool with her cold tea and read the names by the desk lamp, one after another, until the boiler clicked off. Then the cat opened one eye, yawned, and settled again on a list of people who had passed through the infirmary doors long before she was born.