Black and grey traditional-style tattoo of a cat wearing a top hat inside an ornate oval frame with flowers, on the outer thigh, with small amber accents on the eyes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat in a top hat in an oval frame on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A black and grey cat wearing a top hat sits inside an oval cameo frame decorated with scrolling foliage and flowers. The cat and frame are outlined in solid black linework, and the background inside the oval is shaded with fine stippled dots. Small amber accents on the cat's eyes and a purple hat band add colour to an otherwise greyscale design.

Traditional Dotwork Thigh Cat Top hat Oval frame Flower Scrollwork Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Bargemaster Tobias Crane had sold the Marigold to a man from Ely, but the cat would not be sold with her. Every morning for a week the tabby-and-white tom sat on the coal hatch in his brass-buckled top hat, watching the water as if it owed him money. The new owner called him a nuisance. Tobias called him Mr Pennifer, after the solicitor who had cheated him, and said nothing more about it.

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On the ninth day the Marigold lay moored below Hickling Lock in fog so thick the towpath vanished. A boy came down the bank with a lantern and found the cat on the gunwale, hat still perched, staring at a dark patch of river where the lock gates should have been. Nobody believed the boy when he said the cat had mewed three times, sharp and deliberate, like a clerk calling a queue. They believed him a little more when the lock keeper found the gates had been left open by a careless hand, and a coal barge was drifting straight toward the weir.

Tobias came down the cut at dawn to fetch his things. The cat was back on the coal hatch, hat set straight, eyes like two drops of weak tea in the grey light. He lifted it, and it allowed this, which was unusual. 'You can keep the Marigold,' he said, 'but you'll tell me how you knew.' The cat looked at the river and did not answer, as cats do.