Colour tattoo of a black and brown cat with green eyes above an orange rose with green leaves, on a forearm, in neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat face and orange rose on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cat's face with green eyes, black and brown fur and a pink nose sits above a large orange rose with dark green leaves. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with soft shading on the fur and petals. The design fills the forearm, set against a dark background and a person's black and white patterned top.

Neo-trad Traditional Forearm Cat Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dorcas had already claimed the warm side of the Aga when you came down, her black ear flat against the rail and one green eye open to judge you. The yard outside was white to the gate. Your boots still had yesterday's mud frozen into the laces, and the kettle was slow to start, the way it always was in January.

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You fed the hens first, then cracked the skin of ice on the water trough with the back of the hoe. Nan's old rosebush curled up the wall beside the dairy, bare and grey except for one bloom she had refused to let go of. It hung there orange as a lamp, its petals gone soft at the edges, and every morning you told yourself it would be gone by noon. It never was. Nan used to say the rose kept its colour out of spite.

The letter came on the Thursday, in the post with the feed bill. It was from the solicitor in Alnwick, and it said the sale had fallen through again, and that the buyer from the south would not be coming back. You read it twice at the table while the cat pressed her cheek into the paper, marking it the way she marked everything she thought was hers.

By evening the wind had dropped and the sky was clear enough to hurt. You carried the lantern out to the wall and cut the rose at its stem with Nan's secateurs, the one job she never let anyone else do. Dorcas followed you across the frozen yard, tail up, watching the flower swing as though she intended to take it from you. You set it in a jar on the windowsill. In the morning the frost had got to it, and it was the only thing in the house that looked as bright as it had in summer.