Traditional style tattoo on the back of a hand showing a grey and black cat with pink-tinted hair buns, a robe and a banner reading NERF HERDER, beside a photo of the real cat.

Cat portrait tattoo with banner on the hand

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

The image is split: on the left is a photograph of a black and white cat with green eyes, and on the right is a tattoo on the back of a hand. The tattoo shows a cat with hair buns and a light robe, drawn with bold outlines and grey shading, with pink and red flowers around a banner that reads NERF HERDER. The colour is limited to the greens of the eyes, pinks and reds of the flowers and the grey and black of the linework and fill.

Traditional Hand Cat Banner Lettering Flower Robe Hair bun

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

'Mind the hatch, Gull, that cat's sat on the spare coil again,' Orla said without looking up from the fuel gauge. The freighter Thimble Sorrow smelled of hot wiring and damp fur, and the cat in question, a black and white thing with green eyes like two lit pilot lamps, was pressed against the coil with the calm of someone who owned it.

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Gull had been aboard six weeks and still called the cat the passenger. Nobody else did. Its name was Duchess, according to the cargo manifest, but the crew called it Bun, after the two grey knots of fur it wore over its ears, which it groomed each morning with the solemnity of a magistrate. It had come aboard at a dock on Corvel Reach, sitting in a crate marked grain, and had refused to leave.

'It's a herding ship,' Orla said. 'Someone has to mind the nerfs, and the nerfs won't go anywhere without the cat.'

Gull had seen the nerfs: six great shaggy beasts in the forward hold, placid and stinking, forever drifting toward the vents. Whenever one strayed, the cat rose from its coil, crossed the grating in a neat line, and sat in its path until the beast turned back. Nobody had taught it. The first time Gull asked, Orla had shrugged and called it a nerf herder, and the name stuck, painted in careful letters on the hull plate beside the hatch.

The morning the Sorrow lost her starboard drive, the herd broke for the venting shaft, six shaggy bodies bunching toward the one place that would have killed them. The cat got there first. It sat in the mouth of the shaft with its tail wrapped round its feet, and the nerfs stopped as though they'd walked into a wall, and the freighter limped home on one engine with a cat at the hatch and six sleepy beasts at its feet.