Full back tattoo in colour showing a white cat with pink ears, blue and red roses, daisies and skulls, in a Japanese-influenced style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat, roses and skulls across a back

Japanese · Back · Colour · Photo

A large back piece shows a stylised white cat with pink ears and a red collar, surrounded by blue and red roses, white and pink daisies and a row of skulls. The outlines are bold and dark, with flat fills and smooth shading on the cat and petals. Bright reds, blues, pinks and greens dominate the composition, which fills the whole back from shoulder to waist.

Japanese Neo-trad Back Cat Rose Daisy Skull Flower Snake

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The surveyor from the council wanted the gatehouse down by Friday, and I told him the cat had sat on that arch since before his mother was born. He laughed, the way young men do at old women carrying tins of pilchards.

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Tansy was a white queen with pink ears and a red collar buckled tight, and she never once came down for a man with a clipboard. She sat on the broken lintel with one paw raised, as if she were hailing a bus that stopped running in 1871. Down in the moat, where the grass snake lived, the water went still whenever she lifted that paw.

I showed him the ossuary under the chapel, where the monks had stacked skulls in rows like teacups, and the roses the old abbess planted, still red after four centuries of neglect. He wrote nothing down. By the third day the briars had climbed his van and bloomed through the wing mirror, and the daisies had crept between his tyres as if they were taking his measure.

On Friday he came back alone, sheepish, holding a letter from his own employers withdrawing the order. Nobody ever explained it to either of us. Tansy was asleep on the lintel with her paw tucked under her chin, and I left the pilchards out for her anyway, because some arrangements are not mine to make.