Black linework tattoo of a cat sitting on a crescent moon wrapped in swirling vines, with dotwork shading, on the shoulder.

Cat on a crescent moon on a shoulder

Fine line · Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A cat sits on the curve of a crescent moon, with thin trailing vines, curls and a small star or flower motif around it. The linework is fine and slightly sketchy, and the moon's edge is softened with stippled dotwork shading. The design is in black ink on skin, shown in a close, angled view of the shoulder against a dark background.

Fine line Dotwork Shoulder Cat Moon Crescent moon Vine Swirl Star Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat from the lodge has taken to sleeping in the crook of the Bramley, and every evening you stand beneath her with a saucer of milk going warm in your hand. Your grandfather says she is hunting the wasps. You know better. The wasps are drunk on windfalls by August, and she has no interest in them at all.

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Tonight the orchard smells of cut grass and split plums, and the grass below the trees is silver with dew. Up in the branches she has her back to the house, looking east where the moon is rising thin as a paring. You climb the wall, which you are not supposed to do, and the bricks are still warm from the day. From the top you can see that Gran's vines along the fence have run wild over the gate, curling into the wire like handwriting nobody bothered to finish.

She does not want the milk. She steps out onto the lowest limb as though it were a bridge, and the limb bends, and she keeps going until she is perched on the curve of the moon itself, a crescent so bright above the Bramley that you could swear the branch had grown into it. Her tail curls round her feet. Two small stars sit beside her like loose fruit.

You put the saucer on the wall. By morning it will be empty, the cat will be back in the lodge kitchen, and nobody will believe you when you tell them where she went. That is the trouble with late summer. Everything ripens at once and then falls, and you are the only one still awake to watch the moon grow heavier.