Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a grey cat with a finch on its shoulder and a blue rose below, on the side of the ribs.

Cat, finch and rose on the ribs

Neo-trad · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A grey cat with a finch perched on its shoulder dominates the design, with a pearl necklace and round pendant hanging from its neck. A large blue-grey rose with green leaves sits beneath it, and a darker grey swirl fills the lower edge. Bold black outlines, soft shading and touches of red and green give the piece a classic neo-traditional look across the side of the torso.

Neo-trad Ribs Cat Bird Rose Leaves Pendant Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The show had three wagons left when the Harrowgate brothers stopped paying the feed man, and Mother Ebba decided the grey cat would stay with her whatever the bank said. Pell had walked the high wire in the days of big tents, a string of pearls looped twice round her neck and a silver disc hung from it stamped with a six, the number of the strongman's last lift. Nobody remembered him lifting anything after that. The pearls had come off one at a time since, traded at farms for eggs and paraffin, until only the disc and a few beads remained on the cord.

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The finch arrived in a wicker cage bought for a shilling at a fair in Lincoln. It would not stay in the cage. The first night it squeezed out through the bars and settled on Pell's shoulder as if the cat had been waiting for it. They kept to the same routine after that. Pell slept on the warm bonnet of the lorry with the finch tucked into her fur, and each morning the two of them walked the boundary wall of the field where the big top used to stand.

In the last hard winter Ebba dug a tin bath into the frozen ground behind the caravan and planted a rose cutting that a woman in Ripon had given her in exchange for a song. Nothing happened all through January. The council man came in February with papers and a tape measure, and he laughed at the bath and at the cat sitting in it.

The rose opened the night after he left, blue as a bruise in the lamplight, its petals heavy with frost. Pell stood up in the bath and shook the last bead from her cord, and the finch flew down to fetch it. By morning the disc was gone too, and the field was green as far as the road.