Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a tabby cat with green eyes in an ornate filigree frame with roses, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat portrait in an ornate frame on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A realistic tabby cat with green eyes and a blue collar sits inside an oval ornate frame of filigree scrollwork. Two roses sit at the lower left of the frame. The cat is shaded in brown, grey and green with soft blended tones, while the frame and flowers use bold black outlines with grey shading. The tattoo is shown on the upper thigh.

Neo-trad Realism Thigh Cat Tabby cat Portrait Frame Filigree Rose Collar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis had the painter climb the stairs twice before he got the frame right, and by then the cat had lost all interest in sitting still. Tobias Gale, keeper of the Skerrow Light for eleven winters, watched from the doorway as the portraitist coaxed Marmalade's chin up with a folded strip of blue ribbon. The collar was his late wife's idea. She had sewn it from the lining of a coat she never wore again.

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The painter, a thin man from Penzance who smelled of linseed and gin, worked fast in the lamp room while the glass threw their reflections back at them. He wanted the ornament around the oval to be heavy, filigree like the gilt on a church organ, and he sketched two roses at the bottom as though someone had dropped them there in a hurry. Tobias said nothing about the cost. Mrs Hollis had already paid half of it out of the lifeboat fund, and he suspected she would never tell him which half.

When the portrait was finished they hung it in the lower room where the stove kept the damp off. Marmalade took one look at the painted version of himself, green eyes fixed on something past the viewer, and decided it was a better cat than the one in the flesh. He spent the next month sleeping beneath it with his tail curled over the gilt edge, until the first autumn gale tore the shutters loose and the lamp failed for a whole night.

Tobias climbed the tower in the dark with a lantern and a box of matches, and when he came down at dawn the cat was waiting at the foot of the stairs, soaked to the skin and perfectly pleased with himself. The painting had been right about the eyes all along.