Neo-trad style tattoo on a lower leg showing a tabby cat's head inside a space helmet, surrounded by colourful nebula clouds and a small black bat.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat in a space helmet with nebula on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A tabby cat's head sits inside a round space helmet with a bold black outline, its green eyes and pink nose rendered in smooth shading. Soft, painted-looking nebula clouds in teal, orange, pink and purple fill the background, with small star sparkles scattered through them and a solid black bat silhouette near the bottom. The three panels show the same tattoo from the front and both sides of the calf.

Neo-trad Calf Cat Nebula Galaxy Star Bat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had been sitting on the galley hatch since the second watch, nose to the porthole, as if the nebula outside owed her a fish supper and was late paying it.

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Her name was Marmalade, though the engineers called her the Admiral. Tobiah had welded a fishbowl collar onto a spare seal ring the week we left Callisto, and she wore it every time the hull was cycled, sitting bolt upright on the dock rail as though the rest of us were beneath her. For twenty-two days of the Veil run I kept the stove lit and the kettle warm, and every night the colours came through the glass like spilled paint: teal, burnt orange, a pink so bright it stung.

That evening a black shape slid across the glass, wings folded, too quick to be anything we had launched. Tobiah swore it was a loose inspection drone. The Admiral didn't swear. She lifted her head, unhurried, walked the length of the galley table past the bread and the spilled sugar, and sat in front of the window with her helmet catching the light. I watched her reflection settle over the nebula until the two of them looked like one thing, a small brave cat floating in a sea of gas.

I still don't know what she saw out there. I put the kettle on again, because that is what galley cooks do when the universe gets strange, and told her the tea would keep until she'd had her fill of stars. She didn't turn round. Her tail curled once against the glass, and the whole cloud seemed to brighten behind her, as if it had only been waiting for someone to notice.