Colourful neo-traditional tattoo of a cat's head with a flame-like sunburst above it, on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat head with sunburst halo on a leg

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A cat's face with bright turquoise eyes, pink and blue shading and a blue-violet muzzle sits centred on the skin, with a sunburst of orange, pink and white rays behind its head. Bold black outlines define the features and the colour is blended with soft gradients across the fur and the halo. The tattoo fills most of the frame against plain skin.

Neo-trad Calf Cat Sunburst Halo Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came aboard at Cádiz in a crate of lemons with no name, so the crew called her Lantern, because her eyes lit the lower deck like a pair of sea-glass bottles. By the fortieth day out the lemons were gone, the water had turned green and sour, and the men had stopped singing. Old Tobias Reeve, who had rounded the Horn twice and did not care to be told anything, swore the sun was sulking.

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It was Lantern who went up the mast in the grey hour before dawn and sat on the crosstree with her tail wrapped round her feet. She did not climb down until the sky over the eastern swell went the colour of peach skin, then marmalade, then a fire that had been fed. The first ray lifted clear of the water and the whole ship turned gold. Reeve wept into his beard. The cat, they said, had taken the sun in her teeth and carried it up from under the sea the way a mother carries a lamp up the stairs.

Every dawn after that she went up, and every dawn the rays came out behind her head like a crown of flames, orange and pink and white at the tips, so that the men at the wheel could see her from below and steer by her. Nobody thought to ask what she wanted for it. They gave her the best of the tinned fish and a warm place by the galley, and when the Horn finally broke and the water turned blue again, she stepped off onto the quay at Bristol without looking back.

The sailors said that on a clear morning, if you stood on the harbour wall and watched the east, you could still make her out on some rigging nobody else could see, washing her face in the first light and keeping an eye on the ships that were still at sea.