Neo-traditional tattoo of a grey cat face with yellow eyes, a golden crown and a fleur-de-lis on the forearm.

Cat face with crown and fleur-de-lis on forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey cat face with yellow-green eyes, a pink nose and white whiskers sits at the centre of the design, framed by a golden crown above and a golden fleur-de-lis below. Bold black outlines define the fur, with soft grey shading on the face and fine hatched marks on the ears and chest. Orange, yellow and blue accents and a row of white dots along the frame give the piece a bright, mixed palette, shown on a forearm against a green background.

Neo-trad Forearm Cat Crown Fleur-de-lis Bead Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had been the palace's mouser for eleven years before anyone thought to ask for her name, and by then the clerks had already decided she was a queen. Ottoline Marsh, who kept the granary keys in the old customs house at Brackwater, said it was the eyes. They were the yellow of a lamp left burning in a window, and when the cat sat on the tally stool and looked at you, you found yourself checking your collar.

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When the harbourmaster's bell rang short that October, Ottoline went down to the quay with a lantern and her grandmother's string of seed pearls wound twice around her wrist. The cat was already there, sitting on a coil of rope beside the ferry steps, her grey fur bristling against the wind off the mouth of the estuary. Beneath her the tide was going out fast, and a boy from the fish market was standing knee-deep on the slipway, shouting that his brother had gone under the lock gate.

Ottoline did not remember deciding anything. She remembered the cat dropping from the rope, the pearls scattering across the wet stone like a spilt sentence, and the thin white line of a whisker showing her the way along the gate's iron rail. By morning the lock keeper had a boy in blankets and a dozen stories, and the cat had gone back to the granary as though she had only stepped out for air.

The town gave her a crown of gilt paper that winter and a fleur-de-lis carved from driftwood, which she ignored. Ottoline kept the pearls. Some nights, counting grain by lamplight, she thought she heard the cat purring at the door, and when she opened it there was only the harbour, and the bell, and a single pearl rolling away into the dark.