Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a cat's head with large ears and shaded eyes, on the outer forearm.

Cat head on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cat's head faces forward, filling the centre of the forearm. Fine stippled dots and short hatched strokes build up the fur, with a solid dark nose and a bold outline around the ears. The composition is centred and symmetrical, with grey skin and a pavement background visible around the arm.

Dotwork Forearm Cat Cat head Eye Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Patience could say which lock the cat had come up through, only that she was sitting on the coal sacks when Mabel Ruddock went below to light the stove, and that she had not moved in three days. She had ears like a pair of folded letters and eyes the colour of the canal under cloud. Mabel fed her herring heads and called her Sorrow, because the old hands said a cat that watched you that closely was keeping a tally.

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The river took Tom Ferrier in the March flood, off the weir below Hatton. They found him two days later in the reeds at Stoke. The cat, who had never once left the boat, walked the towpath to the spot and sat there until the constable came with his lantern. Mabel swore afterwards that she had wept. Nobody argued, because a bead of dark had gathered under her left eye and it did not dry, no matter how often Mabel wiped it with her apron.

They worked the Patience through the locks that summer with the cat riding the cabin roof. At every cottage where a lock keeper's child had once fallen in, she turned her head to listen, the way she had listened to the water the day she came aboard. Mabel stopped telling people she was a tally keeper. She began to think the cat was counting something she could not yet see.

At the basin in Birmingham the cat stepped off onto the wall without a backward look and sat on a bollard facing the current. Mabel lit the stove that night and left the door open. Sorrow never came back aboard, but Mabel kept the stove going all winter, and every time the boat slowed for a lock she looked to the wall first.