Black and grey traditional-style tattoos of a cat head on the back of a hand and a pocket watch and anchor on a forearm.

Cat head, pocket watch and anchor on arm

Traditional · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A man in a dark denim shirt rests one hand against his chin, showing a cat head on the back of the hand and small tattoos on the fingers. His other forearm, folded across his body, carries a pocket watch, an anchor and lightning-style details. The bold outlines are filled with grey shading, the image is cropped below the chin, and the background is a plain dark grey.

Traditional Hand Forearm Cat Pocket watch Anchor Lightning Finger tattoo

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Garrity had counted the bars of the last waltz three times before she let herself look at the door. The cat saw her first. It came padding in under the cloakroom hatch, a ginger tom with one ear notched like a ticket stub, and sat beneath the bandstand as though it held a card for the evening. Nobody shooed it. Dockside dances had never been strict about who came through the doors, only about who paid.

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Ned Halloran came in at ten past eleven with rain on his cap and his pocket watch open in his palm. He had promised her the Stella Maris would sail on the morning tide and that he would be back before the band packed up. He had also promised to be back by nine. The watch said nothing either way. It had stopped, he told her, the night the squall off the Cape threw the cook's crate across the galley and lightning split the afternoon in two. The hands had sworn the glass shook loose on the rail.

"It's not stopped," Nell said, taking the watch and tipping it toward the chandelier. The hands crept on, a quarter past, then half. "It's only waiting for you to come back to it."

He laughed, and the cat stood up, stretched, and walked out into the rain as if it had somewhere to be too. Nell watched it go. Ned pressed the watch back into her palm and closed her fingers over it. "Then keep it going," he said, "and I'll come back to the tune."