Neo-trad tattoo on a forearm showing a cat in a red headscarf, a grey bird with a pink ribbon and a pink heart with a dotted border.

Cat, bird and heart on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A cat wearing a red headscarf sits above a grey bird with a pink ribbon, and a pink heart with a dotted border sits at the bottom of the design. The cat and bird are shaded in greys with bold black outlines, while the headscarf, ribbon and heart use bright red and pink fills. The design is shown in two side-by-side photographs of the same forearm tattoo.

Neo-trad Forearm Cat Bird Heart Ribbon Headscarf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every autumn the cat in the red headscarf came down from the top shelf of Mrs Halloran's kitchen dresser, and every autumn the sparrow was waiting on the windowsill to hear her creak. She was a painted doll that came apart at the middle, and inside her lived a smaller cat, and inside that one a smaller still. Pim, the sparrow, thought this was the most sensible arrangement he had ever seen. The cat thought he was far too interested in what she kept hidden.

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Pim had spent a whole summer hopping along the gutter outside the haberdasher's on Fore Street, and in the bin behind the shop he found a length of pink ribbon, the colour of a boiled sweet. He carried it to the dresser in his beak and laid it across the cat's lap like a offering. She would not take it. Ribbons, she said, were for things that stayed, and nothing that flew in and out of an open window could be trusted to stay. Pim said that was exactly why he wanted one, so he would always know where to find the things he loved.

That night the cat unscrewed herself, one doll after another, until the smallest one was no bigger than a thimble. Inside it lay a brass heart with a hole punched through the top, and a dotted border worn soft by somebody else's thumb. The cat looked at the sparrow for a long time. Then she threaded the ribbon through the hole and tied it round Pim's neck in a bow that was far too big for him.

In the morning the dresser was bare and the windowsill was empty. Mrs Halloran swept up a little pink thread and a scatter of crumbs, and she never did find the dolls. Down by the harbour, though, a grey sparrow with a bright heart at his throat was seen perching on the mooring ropes, and he never once let go of it.