Black ink drawing of a round cat face with a large bow and ornamental swirls filling one side, on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat face with bow and swirl pattern

Black and grey · Flash

The drawing shows a round cat face with a large bow at the top and a small nose and whiskers. One half of the face is filled with ornamental scrolls, swirls and small triangular motifs, while the other half stays open with light hatching. Bold black outlines and fine cross-hatching sit on a pale cream background with a soft darker edge.

Cat Bow Swirl Scroll Whiskers Ornamental pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bills had stopped coming in March, and by October the Pemberton Travelling Circus had shrunk to three wagons, a grey pony called Dolly, and a white cat named Mab who was the only thing left that still drew a crowd. Ivy Pemberton, fourteen and tired of mending canvas, sat on the step of the blue wagon with a tin of gold paint and a brush borrowed from the vicar's wife.

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"Hold still," she said. Mab never held still, but she sat for a sardine, and the sardine was in Ivy's pocket. The wind came off the harbour at Weymouth and rattled the guy ropes while Ivy worked the swirls out from Mab's cheek, curling them up over one ear and down into a row of small triangles like the teeth of a saw. She left the other half of the face bare, with only a few hatched lines for shadow, because her grandfather always said a performer needed one side that belonged to the audience and one that belonged to herself.

Arthur Pemberton came out in his coat over his nightshirt and watched from the caravan steps. "They'll think she's been to a tattooist," he said. "Let them," said Ivy, and tied the black bow between Mab's ears so tightly that the cat sneezed in disgust.

That night the big top held forty people, most of them with blankets over their knees. Mab walked the painted drum, her gold scrolls catching the lamplight, and the crowd murmured as if they had been handed something precious. Then a little girl in the front row leaned towards her mother and asked why the cat had two faces. Ivy, watching from the ring curtain, realised the child was looking at the plain side, the side that looked back at people as if it knew them. Mab jumped down, trotted past the pony, and vanished into the dark behind the wagons, the gold curls flickering like smoke as she went.