Realistic colour tattoo of a seated cat within an ornate gold and teal scrollwork frame on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat portrait with gold scroll frame on thigh

Realism · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A seated tabby-style cat faces forward with pale green eyes, rendered in soft shading with pink, grey and cream tones. It sits inside a symmetrical frame of yellow-orange scrollwork with teal accents and a fleur-like base at the bottom. The photograph is taken straight on, with the design filling most of the upper thigh.

Realism Thigh Cat Portrait Scrollwork Frame Flourish

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dearest Nell,

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You will not believe what the captain has done. We lay three weeks off Valparaíso waiting on a cargo of nitrate, and a painter came aboard with a tin box of brushes and a face like a wet Sunday. He wanted to paint the cat. Old Biscuit, our grey tabby, who has done nothing in four years but sleep on the flour sacks and bring us mice he has no intention of eating.

Biscuit would not sit for him. He turned his back and went under the galley stove, and the painter swore in three languages. I told him to bring a saucer of pilchards and sit still himself. By the second afternoon the cat had come up onto the bench beside the copper pots, settled his tail round his feet, and stared at the painter with those pale green eyes as if he were the one being judged. The painter said nothing after that and simply worked.

The result is the captain's pride now. The picture hangs in his cabin inside a frame of gilt scrollwork, curling leaves and a fleur at the foot, which cost more than the cat's whole life in fish. The steward says the captain calls it the Ship's Lord. Biscuit has not once looked at it. He still wants his pilchards, and he still climbs onto the flour sacks at four every morning to watch me knead.

Last night I took the captain's supper tray in and found the cat there, sitting on the rug below his own likeness, gazing up at the frame as though waiting for it to say something. I left the tray and carried him down to the galley. Some things a frame cannot hold, Nell, and Biscuit has always known it.

Your loving sister, Marthe