Neo-trad colour tattoo of a tabby cat's face with green eyes, set above a red rose with green leaves, on a forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat portrait and rose on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A realistically shaded tabby cat face with green eyes, whiskers and a pink nose sits above a bold red rose with green leaves. The cat has soft blended shading in brown and orange, while the rose uses flat red and pink tones with heavy black outlines. The design is centred on the skin with a dark background around it.

Neo-trad Realism Forearm Cat Tabby cat Rose Leaves Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat arrived in November the way every cat on Hollin Farm arrived, by being there before anyone noticed. She was a brown tabby with a face like a disapproving magistrate and eyes the green of pond weed under ice. My father named her Bess. I never named her at all, because she came to the kitchen door when she pleased and left when the milk ran out, and that seemed a fair arrangement to us both.

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The rose was my mother's. It grew against the north wall of the dairy, a red climber that flowered twice a year and sulked the rest. After the funeral nobody pruned it, and by January it had become a knot of grey canes that knocked against the stone whenever the wind came off the fell. Bess spent whole afternoons on the water butt beneath it, watching those bare stems as if one of them owed her money.

On the coldest morning of the year I found her there with frost furred along her whiskers and something dangling from her mouth that was not a mouse. It was a rosehip, black and shrivelled, that had hung on through every gale. She dropped it at my boots like a receipt and strolled off towards the barn without looking back. I pocketed the hip and forgot it on the kitchen windowsill, where it sat through the sleet, the power cut and the long grey week that followed.

In April the rose broke out all along the wall, so thick the dairy vanished behind it. I came out at dawn and found Bess asleep in the middle of the bush, orange fur tangled with red petals, one paw curled over a bloom as though she had been the one keeping it alive all winter.