Solid black silhouette of a seated cat inside an ornate baroque oval frame, shown as a flat design with no body placement.

Cat silhouette in an ornate cameo frame

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a cat seen from the side, sitting upright with its tail curling around its body. The cat sits within an oval cameo panel surrounded by a dense, scrolling baroque frame with floral and scroll motifs. The image is a flat, high contrast black drawing on a white background, with no shading and a symmetrical composition.

Blackwork Cat Silhouette Cameo Frame Oval Scroll Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The portrait had hung above the stairs at Thornleigh for eighty years, and nobody at the house could say who the lady in the oval frame had been. Mrs Okafor-Bell, who kept the accounts and disliked anything she could not add up, said the cat painted beside her was the only thing in the picture worth looking at. It sat upright in the cameo with its tail wrapped neatly round its feet, as if it had been waiting a long time for someone to come back up the stairs.

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The new housemaid, Ada Finch, was the one who noticed the frame had been moved. She swore to Mrs Okafor-Bell that it hung a finger's width further left every Monday, and that the scrolls at the top had been polished bright on one side only. Mrs Okafor-Bell told her to stop dusting in the gallery and go and fetch the coal. Ada went, but she left the back door open on purpose and listened.

On the Friday, the gilt was found scratched in a neat line along the bottom curl, and the cat's silhouette had a fresh notch in its tail where the paint had lifted. Nobody confessed. That night Ada took the portrait down herself, wrapped it in an old dust sheet and carried it to the cellar, where she set it against the wine racks with the cat facing the wall. In the morning the cellar door was open and the frame was back on its hook, the cat looking out at the stairs once more, and a single black hair lay on the bottom step, as if something had walked up through the house and, for once, been satisfied.