Black cat silhouette sitting inside an ornate scrolled oval frame, a blackwork tattoo on the forearm.

Cat silhouette in ornate oval frame

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a seated cat, turned to the right, sits inside an oval cameo frame. The frame is decorated with curling scrollwork and a small heart-shaped motif at its top. The cat is filled solid black with clean edges, while the frame uses bold scrolling lines against pale skin on a dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top went to a scrap merchant in March, so our last proper season was played out in a Methodist hall in Wakefield, the lights run off a generator that coughed whenever Dad lifted his hand. Mrs Pim didn't mind the smaller stage. She had never liked the tent, with its draughts and its stink of wet sawdust, and she sat through every rehearsal on the lid of the upright piano as if it were her throne.

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Her act was the strangest thing we owned. Dad had cut an oval from a sheet of plywood, then fretted scrolls around it like the ironwork on a Victorian gate, and fixed it to the back of the wagon with a single lamp behind. When the light came on, Mrs Pim climbed onto the little plinth in front of the frame and sat, tail wrapped round her feet, turned to the right, so the hall saw only her outline, black as a stove. Nobody clapped until she had held still for a count of ten. Then she stood, stretched, and strolled off, and the shadow stayed in the frame a moment longer than it should have.

Dad died in October. The council grant ran out before Christmas, and the lorry went back to the yard with the frame strapped along its side. I drove it to a storage unit in Leeds myself. The man at the gate asked what the little heart at the top was for, and I told him it was where Dad had carved his initials, which was a lie. Inside the cold unit I ran my thumb over that heart until the wood gave back a bit of warmth, and Mrs Pim, who had come along in the cab, sat down in the dust in front of it as if the lamp had just come on.

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