Black ink fine line and dotwork tattoo of a cat head with a rose over one ear and lightning bolts below, centred on a person's upper back.

Cat head with rose and lightning bolts on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cat's head in outline with a rose tucked behind one ear, a small triangle motif on the forehead, and a ruff of swirling curls beneath the chin. Two lightning bolts with stippled dots hang below the design. The linework is fine and even, with dotwork used for shading, and the piece is in black ink only, centred on the upper back.

Fine line Dotwork Back Cat Rose Lightning bolt Swirl Triangle Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter from Hesket Wells swore the cat had sat on the milestone since before the road was tarred, and that her ruff was never once dusty, not even in August when the wind lifted the whole flat into the sky. Folk called her Mother Tallow. She had a triangle inked on her brow, though nobody had inked it, and a yellow eye on either side of her nose that watched the western hills for weather.

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Travellers left her a saucer of milk at the well, and a rose if they had one. She drank the milk and tucked the roses behind her ear, so that by the end of every summer the bloom sat there like a second, paler ear. Nobody thought much of this until the year the storms came down off the ridge in a line, and a boy named Joss Penrhyn tried to ride through them with a mule and a tin of coins for his sister's wedding.

The lightning came walking across the flat in two long strides. Joss saw it, went white, and turned the mule, but the mule would not go. The bolts split the air above the road. Mother Tallow rose from the milestone, shook out her ruff, and stepped into the middle of the road. The lightning struck the sand where she stood and ran out from her in two black forks, and there it stopped, as if it had been told.

Joss lived, and the mule, and the coins. In the morning the carter found two dark glass threads set in the sand, and the cat asleep on the milestone with a fresh rose behind her ear. Where the road crosses the flat, the sand still shines in two lines when the sun comes low, and the children say that is the only place in the desert where the ground keeps a promise.