Two calf tattoos of grey cat portraits, one framed by gold scrollwork with a red rose, the other surrounded by orange poppies, in a realism and neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat portraits with flowers on two calves

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two lower-leg tattoos sit side by side on a pair of legs in rolled-up jeans. The left calf shows a grey cat's head in shaded realistic detail, set in a gold scrollwork frame with a red rose and a small pearl-like stone below. The right calf shows a second grey cat portrait with orange poppies and green leaves wrapping around it, with softer shading and more colour.

Realism Neo-trad Calf Cat Rose Poppy Flower Leaves Scrollwork Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada Tallis kept two grey cats on Sker Holm, and the island had a rule that no cat was to be painted, because a cat painted was a cat owed. Nobody remembered who had made the rule. Ada broke it the winter the fishing failed, paying a travelling limner with a sack of salt cod and her mother's brass clock to put both of her cats on oak boards.

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The first board she hung in the kitchen, ringed in gilt scrollwork the limner had learned in Kirkwall, with a red rose and a pearl-coloured stone at its foot so the eye had somewhere to rest. The second she gave to her sister Ruth, who lived across the sound and had no cat of her own. Ruth had asked for something bright, so the limner painted poppies around that cat, orange as the peat fire, with green leaves climbing over its ears like weed on a wall.

Ruth hung her cat by the door. Each morning, going down to the boats, she touched the poppies with two fingers, and each evening she touched them again. The island said this was foolishness, and that a painted cat would never take a mouse. Ruth did not need a mouse taken. She needed the cat to be somewhere she could find it.

When Ada crossed the sound that spring to fetch the gilt frame back, she found her own grey cat had gone out on the reef in March and not returned. Ruth's cat had come home to sit on the kitchen sill, and would not be shifted. Ada left the frame where it hung. Ruth said nobody on Sker Holm would be fool enough to move a cat that had chosen its wall.