Neo-traditional colour tattoo on a forearm showing a grey tabby cat head, a white mouse, blue flowers, green leaves and a red rose, shown in two side-by-side photos.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat, mouse and rose on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey tabby cat's head with yellow-green eyes, with a small white mouse perched on leaves at the top and a red rose at the bottom. Blue flowers and green leaves frame the cat and fill the sides of the design. The cat is shaded in greys with fine linework, while the rose and flowers use bold, solid colour, and the two photos show the same tattoo from slightly different angles.

Neo-trad Botanical Forearm Cat Tabby cat Mouse Rose Flower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook aboard the Marigold Jane swore the grey tabby had come up the gangway in a sack of Cornish potatoes, and nobody had ever proved him wrong. She slept on the warm lid of the bread oven and ate what the crew ate, which was far less than she was owed, so the mice of the hold began visiting the galley in pairs, then in crowds, to see for themselves whether the stories were true.

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One of them, a small white mouse with a torn ear, climbed the rope of the lamp hook one night when the sea was up and the floor was sliding. He had come to ask a favour. The cat, who had heard a great many requests and granted few, told him to say it plainly. He wanted passage past the cask of molasses where the rats kept their court, and he offered in return the one thing a ship's cat could never fetch for herself: a rose cutting, wrapped in oilcloth, which the bosun had hidden behind the spirit locker and forgotten.

She considered this with her eyes half shut. Then she led him along the beam to the sill where the mate kept a tin of seed and a jar of blue cornflowers pressed flat between the pages of an old psalter, and she said that a rose wants soil, and soil is what a cat knows how to dig. Between them they got the cutting into a pot of galley ash before the watch changed.

By the time the Marigold Jane made Falmouth the cutting had put out three red buds, and the mouse had grown fat on molasses he no longer had to share. The cat still slept on the bread oven. When the ship's boy asked why the rose was watered before the bosun's own tea, the cook only said that some debts are paid in leaves, and that a cat is owed the first bloom.