Black and grey blackwork and dotwork tattoo of a cat holding a geometric star, placed on the outer thigh.

Cat holding a star on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cat sits upright with its tail curling along the lower edge, one paw resting on a large angular star. The cat is drawn with dense etched hatching and stippled dotwork on its fur and paw, while the star uses clean, bold outlines and internal lines. The design is entirely in black and grey ink and fills most of the thigh against a plain light background.

Blackwork Dotwork Thigh Cat Star Paw Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Marigold came in on the ebb with her nets in ribbons and no sign of the Pascoe boy, and Tamsin Roe was down the slipway before the engine had died. The cat was already on the bow, sitting up as neat as a verger, one paw pinning a wet chart to the rail. Nobody in Porthgwidden owned her. The fleet fed her, and in return she sat on the gunwales and watched the water as if she were checking its accounts.

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The star had been the Marigold's wheelhouse badge, a brass compass point the skipper had prised off the day his father drowned and never put back. Now it sat loose in the cat's paw. When Tamsin reached for it, the cat stood, arched her back, and stepped off the bow onto the harbour wall without looking to see whether she was followed.

Tamsin followed. The cat went along the breakwater, over the weed and the rusted mooring rings, out to the point where the lighthouse keeper's dog lay under a cairn of pebbles. Below the cliff, in a cove visible only at the bottom of the tide, Eli Pascoe sat on a lobster pot with his trousers rolled, cutting the last of a net free from a rock. He had been there since dawn. The tide had turned behind him without his noticing.

Tamsin hauled him up the ladder by his collar and said nothing about the net. The cat sat on the top rung, washed one foreleg, and dropped the star at the boy's feet. That evening the skipper turned the brass over and over in his hands and said nothing either, then tied it to the cat's collar with a bootlace. She bore it with the dignity of a bishop accepting a gift. Tamsin counted the boats from the wall. Seven. It was the right number.