Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a cat wearing a striped scarf and holding a takeaway coffee cup, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat in a scarf holding a coffee cup

Dotwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cartoon-style cat wearing a striped scarf that hangs down the arm, with one paw holding a takeaway coffee cup. The outlines are bold and the fur and shading are built from fine stippled dots and short hatching. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, with a dark striped sleeve visible at the left edge of the frame.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top came down in March and went into a lorry bound for a sale yard in Lincolnshire, so the only act still on the books is the cat. You are the one who carries her up the caravan steps each morning, because Ruby Fenn will not let anyone else touch the scarf, and the coffee has to come from the garage on the bypass, black with one sugar, in a cardboard cup with the plastic lid still on.

Keep reading

Mrs Pell knitted the scarf in 1974 from the leftover wool of the lion's blanket, so every stripe carries a little of the old cage. At the frayed end she stitched a small heart and a number seven, which the children used to fight over. Nobody counts the seven anymore. The audience is eleven old men who come for the bingo in the tent, and the cat sits on the ticket table with one paw wrapped round the cup, watching them the way a magistrate watches a man who has come to plead.

On Thursday the man from the council arrives in a grey car with a clipboard and asks what the field is for. You tell him it is for the circus. He writes something down and asks whether the cat is a performer or an asset. You say she is neither, she is a customer. He does not laugh, but he does take the coffee you hand him, because it is hot and nobody has offered him anything in years.

That night you fold the striped scarf over the back of the last chair, pour the cat her saucer of milk, and switch off the generator. Beyond the wagons the field lies pale under the moon, and the scarf hangs from the chair like a flag nobody has come to take down.

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