Traditional colour tattoo on an upper arm showing a grey cat head with a cross on its forehead, above a woman with long dark hair smoking a cigarette, surrounded by clouds and green sparkles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat-headed woman with cigarette on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A large colour tattoo covers the upper arm and shoulder. A grey cat's head with yellow eyes and a small cross on its forehead sits above a woman with long dark hair, yellow-tinged skin, red eyeshadow and a cigarette held between her fingers, with smoke rising from it. Bold black outlines, flat fills and a background of yellow clouds and green four-pointed sparkles frame the composition.

Traditional Upper arm Shoulder Cat Woman Cigarette Cross Cloud Sparkle Long hair Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mam always said the grey cat came with the boat, the way the damp came with the boat, and nobody had bought either of them. He sat on the coal hatch of the Thistle every evening at the lock below Hillmorton, watching my aunt Edie go past with her Capstans and her hair pinned up against the rain. She called him the Sexton because of the white mark on his forehead, like a churchyard cross, and she said he kept the dead canals tidy.

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Edie smoked on the towpath and talked to that cat as if he answered her. The winter I was eleven, my uncle Walt went out in the fog to free a butty stuck on the weir, and the fog came down so thick you could lose a horse in it. Edie stood at the top gate with a lit cigarette, holding it up high so the glow would show him the way. Mam said that was foolishness. Edie said a light is a light whatever the sense of it.

When the Sexton jumped off the hatch and went off along the bank, nobody thought to follow him but me. I found him sitting on the bollard by the weir, golden eyes lit by the lamp, and Walt hanging onto the chain beside him, soaked and swearing and alive. The cat looked at me as if I had been slow.

We got them both home by the last of the light. Edie took her cigarette out of her fingers, looked at the thin curl of smoke going up into the grey, and lit another from the end of it. The cat settled on the coal hatch and closed his eyes, the cross on his brow pale against the dark water.