Colourful tattoo of a realistic cat face with green eyes, mixed with geometric triangles, a crescent moon and watercolour drips on a thigh.

Cat face and crescent moon on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo combines a realistic grey tabby cat face with green eyes and a crescent moon above it. Angular triangles in pink, yellow, green and teal sit behind the design, with watercolour-style washes and drips running down the lower section. The fur on the cat is shaded softly and in detail, while the background shapes are loose and flat, and the composition fills a diagonal area of the thigh.

Realism Geometric Thigh Cat Crescent moon Triangle Watercolour Drip Abstract Green eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

On Skerra, the women who mended nets said the moon had once been stolen by a grey tom cat called Mollin, who lived under the old kiln at the far end of the strand. He was no handsome thing. One ear was torn, and his eyes were the green of sea glass held up to a lamp. Every evening he climbed onto the pier and sat with his tail wrapped round his feet, watching the crescent rise over Gallow Head as if it owed him rent.

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One autumn Tam, the baker's boy, found a kite in the wrack, its paper the colour of boiled sweets and its frame cracked clean across. He mended it with cotton and flew it off the dunes. Mollin followed the tail through the marram grass, because no cat can resist a string. When the wind dropped, the kite came down on the shingle and Mollin pounced on it, and as he batted at the paper its colours ran. Pink bled into teal, yellow into the green of the shallows, and a black stain spread from one corner like spilt ink.

The moon, seeing its own light smeared across the bay, came down the dark to fetch its shine back. Mollin sat on the pier with coloured water dripping from his whiskers and would not give it up. The moon offered him the whole harbour's catch. Mollin said he would only trade for the one thing nobody had ever given him, which was a name. So the moon called him Lantern, and he gave back the light, though some of the colour stayed in the sea.

Still, when the crescent hangs low over Gallow Head, the women leave a saucer of milk by the kiln. Tam, grown now and mending nets himself, says the paint drips on the rocks at low tide are Lantern's leavings, and nobody is to scrub them off.