Colour tattoo on skin of an anthropomorphic cat wearing a top hat, monocle and red bow tie inside an ornate oval frame, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat in top hat and monocle in an oval frame

Neo-trad · Colour · Photo

A cat dressed as a gentleman wears a red top hat, a round monocle on a chain, a red bow tie and a dark suit with a waistcoat. The figure sits inside an ornate orange and gold oval frame with a blue sky behind it. Bold dark outlines and smooth shading give the cat's fur and the suit cloth a solid, detailed finish.

Neo-trad Traditional Cat Top hat Monocle Bow tie Suit Oval frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down on those crates and mind the sawdust, it gets into a man's teeth. You want the tale of Sir Ambrose Tibbs, last ringmaster of Harrowgate's Travelling Menagerie, and I will tell it, though my voice is as worn as the big top. Picture it in its prime: striped canvas snapping over Market Square, a brass band wheezing its way through the overture, and at the centre of it all a grey tabby in a red top hat, a brass monocle swinging on its chain like a pendulum counting out the last of the crowds.

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The circus was dying by inches. The elephant had been sold to a firm in Rotterdam, the trapeze wires had rusted through, and the Saturday matinee would not buy a pint of milk for the lions. Ambrose did not complain. He polished his monocle on his waistcoat each morning and told the lads that a gentleman pays his debts with good manners. "The town is ours until the last bell," he would say, and he meant it, the way a man keeps hold of a thing he can no longer afford.

On the final night a stranger came under the flap carrying a cardboard suitcase and asked whether the ringmaster was hiring. Ambrose looked her over through his glass, took a long while about it, then bowed so low his hat tipped off into the sawdust. "We are not hiring," he said, "but it seems we are about to be rescued." She opened the case. Inside lay a bow tie, red as a fox's tongue, and a folded programme for a show that had never once been performed.

So the band struck up again, three children in the front row clapped in their mittens, and Ambrose walked the length of the ring with that programme in his paw. He read every line aloud to the empty benches, and when he reached the end he found the closing words were not his own. Ladies and gentlemen, he said, the show is over, which is the only honest thing a showman ever says. Then he settled his hat, tucked the monocle into his pocket and walked out into the dark, and the lamps went down behind him one by one.