Grey shaded cat head with teal eyes, surrounded by scrolling swirls and lotus flowers, tattooed on the side of a thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat head with teal eyes and lotus flowers on thigh

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A cat's head in soft grey shading sits at the centre of the design, with swirling ornamental linework rising above it and flowing down the leg. Two lotus flowers appear at the top and bottom, with the cat's eyes the only area of colour, a bright teal. The image is taken close up at a slight angle against a dark background.

Realism Botanical Thigh Cat Lotus Swirl Flower Scrollwork Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last season of Pemberton's Travelling Show began with the big top patched in three colours and a biscuit tin that held less each night. Mabel Quayle counted the takings on the step of the caravan while the lamps guttered in the field outside Doncaster. Most of the bills went on feed for the ponies. What was left went on the cat.

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Saffron was grey as wet slate and old enough that her whiskers had gone white at the tips. She rode the central podium in a painted lotus cup that Mabel had restored by lamplight, and when the spotlight found her, the crowd forgot the wheezing calliope and the sawdust gone grey. Her eyes were a teal so bright that the old ringmaster swore he had traded a barrel of ale at Stamford for them. Mabel had never believed him. She believed the cat.

On the final Saturday, Mabel finished the scrollwork on the side of the ticket wagon, curling vines that rose up the boards like smoke from a snuffed candle. Pemberton stood beside her with his hat in his hands and said the bank would take the wagons in the morning. Mabel nodded and kept painting, because a line finished was a line nobody could argue with.

When she looked up, the podium was empty. A trail of pale hairs led through the gate and down the towpath toward the water. Mabel found Saffron on the bank where the river bent under a willow, sitting exactly as she sat in the ring, tail curled around her paws, facing the far lights of the town. The teal eyes caught the lamplight from the bridge and held it. Mabel sat beside her in the wet grass and did not open the tin. Let the cat have the last of the show.