Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a cat-faced geisha with hair sticks, a yellow flower and a red and purple patterned kimono, on the calf.

Cat-faced geisha on a calf

Japanese · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cat-faced geisha figure with black hair, gold hair sticks and a yellow flower above one ear fills the calf. The figure wears a red and purple kimono with a scalloped pattern, and the linework is bold and black. Bright red, yellow and purple ink dominate, set against plain skin and a wooden floor in the background.

Japanese Traditional Calf Cat Geisha Kimono Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lift in Carrow House has been broken since March, so you carry the shoebox up fourteen floors with a tabby yowling inside it. Mr Pell in 14C has been feeding the strays off the car park again, and this one, with its notched ear, followed you from the bins to the stairwell and would not be shaken off. On the landing you set the box down and wipe your palms on your jeans. The corridor smells of Sunday curry and bleach.

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Inside your flat the radio is already on, murmuring about the weather in Leeds. Your nan's wooden doll sits on the windowsill where you left her, gold hair sticks catching the orange glow from the estate. Nan always said she was a kokeshi from Sendai, but whoever painted her had a sense of humour: round ears, whiskers like a dropped pen, a red mouth no bigger than a currant. You used to tell the children on the fourth floor she was a geisha who had lost her way home. Nobody on the landing has ever disagreed.

You let the cat out of the box. It walks straight past the doll, sniffs the radiator, then settles in the exact patch where the sun will fall tomorrow, as if it has been told to wait. At half nine Mr Pell knocks, looking for the tabby with the notched ear that he swears has been missing since Tuesday. You tell him you haven't seen it, and point at the windowsill, where the doll's painted flower has come loose and is lying on the sill like an offering.

Mr Pell looks at the doll, then at the cat, and says nothing. Some things on Carrow House are simply let be.