Realism and neo-traditional style tattoo of a grey and cream cat with green eyes, set in a gold beaded frame, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat portrait in ornate frame on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A realistic portrait of a grey and cream cat with bright green eyes and long whiskers fills the centre of the tattoo. It is framed by an ornate gold oval with a beaded border and curled leaf-like flourishes. The shading on the fur is soft and detailed, while the frame uses bold outlines and warm orange-gold tones, and the design sits centrally across the upper back.

Realism Neo-trad Back Cat Portrait Frame Bead Whiskers Pet portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The gilt frame came up in the net on a Tuesday, tangled in the weed of the Mary Ann's trawl, and nobody in Skerrow wanted it. Old Tobias Nance carried it up the slipway under one arm and leaned it against the wall of the net loft, where a cat sat watching him with eyes like sea glass held to a lamp. The frame had no picture in it. There was only the oval, the beaded rim, and the leaves curling at its sides as if they wanted to grip something.

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The cat was called Mrs Pendle, though she answered to nothing but the tin of pilchards. She had come off a boat from Penzance the winter the Lydia went down, and she had never once been seen to be afraid of the water. Each morning she sat in the empty frame on the loft floor, head fitted to the oval as if it had been measured for her. The fishermen laughed at first, and then they stopped laughing, because the Mary Ann came home safe on every day she sat there and never went out on the days she did not.

Tobias's daughter Ada, who painted the chapel windows and was not supposed to paint anything else, took a brush to a board one wet afternoon. She did not paint the frame. She painted the cat, grey and cream, whiskers out like rigging, and when it was dry she hung it inside the gilt where the real cat could see it. Mrs Pendle walked round the board three times and then lay down beneath it.

The sea took the Mary Ann that November in a squall off the Gull Rock, all four men aboard her. Nobody in Skerrow asked the cat why she had stayed ashore that morning, and nobody asked her to sit in the frame again. The portrait hung in the loft for years after, and on still mornings the green of its eyes caught the light off the harbour, as if the painted cat were still counting the boats in.