Black line drawing of a seated cat with pink, purple and blue watercolour splashes on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat outline with watercolour splashes on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A thin black outline of a cat seen from behind, with its tail curling down and to the right, sits on the forearm. Soft pink, purple and blue watercolour-style washes fill the area around and inside the body, with the black linework left clean and unshaded. The tattoo is centred on a plain skin background with a blurred floor and furniture in the far corners.

Fine line Forearm Cat Watercolour splash Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Abernethy never painted the cat, though she painted everything else in the front room of the house on Gull Lane. Every morning the tabby sat on the sill and watched the sea go from pewter to pearl, and every morning Mrs Abernethy wet her brushes and said the light was wrong. The cat did not care about the light. He cared about the saucer of cream and the way the tide dragged the shingle like a sleeper turning over.

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Then the autumn came in sideways and the damp got into her knuckles. She stopped going out with the easel. She sat with a pad on her knee and a tin of cakes of colour beside her, and she painted the sea in three washes: pink for the sky going down, violet for the shadow under the pier, blue for the water that never quite agreed to be blue.

The cat walked across the wet paper once, deliberately, the way cats do when they have decided a thing belongs to them. Mrs Abernethy swore at him in the gentle voice she kept for him. She did not wipe the marks away. She took up her black ink pen and traced the shape he had left behind: the ears, the arch of the back, the tail rising and then falling in a question mark he had never once answered.

When she finished, the outline was all that was sharp in the room. The colour had run out beyond it and settled where it wanted to be. The cat was asleep on the sill now, warm and entirely himself, and the painting on the pad looked as if the sea had come up to see who was there.