Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a cat in a top hat and monocle, with roses, an apple and a One Love script on the calf.

Cat in top hat with One Love script

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A grey cat with green eyes wears a black top hat with a feather and a gold monocle on a chain, dressed in a dark jacket. Roses, a green apple and a leaf-like flourish surround the figure, and the words One Love in flowing script run along the bottom. Bold outlines, smooth shading and saturated colour give the piece a classic neo-traditional look, set against a dark background.

Neo-trad Calf Cat Top hat Monocle Feather Apple Rose Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had given up asking the cat to leave the refectory, so he set the bread knife down and watched Mortimer climb onto the bench with the solemn care of a magistrate. The hat was the problem. It had turned up in the lost property cupboard by the gatehouse a decade back, and Mortimer had claimed it the way he claimed everything worth having, by sitting on it until nobody could remember whose it was.

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"He's been in the orchard again," said Sister Clemence, lifting a windfall from the basket. Its skin was bruised, and one side had a neat bite taken out, as if someone had tested it for soundness. "Look at that."

Anselm looked. Beyond the window the old roses along the cloister wall were giving their last flush, and the lay brothers had stopped complaining about the monocle. Mortimer had found it in the abbot's sewing box and wore it on its gold chain whenever the bell rang for vespers, peering at the congregation as though he were tallying their sins for the ledger.

The ledger was the real trouble. For three winters the orchard had been short, the tithe barrel had run dry in spring, and Anselm had quietly blamed the foxes. Then, one grey morning, he found the cat sitting on the ledger itself, one paw on the page where the figures stopped adding up. Beneath the paw lay a single green apple, bitten in a precise half-moon.

"Well," Anselm said, and found that he was smiling. He tore out the damaged page, folded it into his sleeve, and carried the apple down to the gate. He left it on the step for the boy from the village who came each Thursday with the post. When he climbed back up the path, Mortimer had already gone to sleep in the hat, which had slipped over one ear and looked, for once, entirely unbothered.