Two colour tattoos of cats in ornate gilt-style frames on the lower legs of a person sitting on wooden stairs, placed on the calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat portraits in ornate frames on the calves

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two tattoos sit on the lower legs, each showing a cat inside an ornate oval frame with a dark outline and decorative scrollwork. The cats are rendered in greys, whites and muted teal shading, with the frames shaded in brown and gold tones. The photograph is taken from above the knees down, with the feet, a hand resting on one leg and stacked bracelets visible against wooden stair treads.

Neo-trad Calf Cat Portrait Leg Bracelet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came up the back stairs of Hollis and Daughter on a Tuesday, and I was the one who had to carry it, because Mr Brand said the lift had been condemned since the war and nobody else had the knees for it. Inside, wrapped in newspaper gone the colour of weak tea, were two oval frames with scrollwork so heavy you could have wedged a door with them. Each held a cat. One was grey, one was the blue-white of a cold window, and both wore the same expression, which was the expression of a cat who has been asked to wait.

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Mrs Pell had painted them herself, the ledger said, between 1931 and her death in a flat above a chemist in Otley. Nobody had ever bought them. Mr Brand wanted them sold by the lot, but I kept turning them to the wall whenever I passed, and every time I turned them back, the cats had shifted a little closer to the edge of their oval. I told myself that was dust on the varnish. I told myself a good many things that winter, most of them on the stairs.

The turn came in March. I took the grey one home under my coat, meaning to hang it over the bath, and when I climbed my own stairs that night, six treads of bare pine, the frame was lying face down on the third step with its hook snapped clean. The cat was sitting on the fourth. Her eyes followed me up without her head moving at all.

I put her back in the crate and drove her to the saleroom in the morning with the blue one beside her. Mr Brand signed for them without looking up. The last thing I saw, before the van door shut, was the grey cat pressed into the far corner of her frame, one paw resting on the very rim, as if she were only waiting for someone to open the door on the stairs.