Black silhouette of a cat seen from behind, sitting above a diagonal trail of black paw prints on a white background, shown as a flash design.

Cat silhouette with paw print trail

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a seated cat, viewed from behind with its tail hanging down, sits at the top of the image. A winding trail of small black paw prints descends from the cat's tail to the bottom of the frame, alternating left and right. The design is plain black on white with no shading, and it is shown as a standalone drawing rather than on skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost had kept the trail for you. Small prints, pressed neat as stamps, ran from the foot of the garden wall down the length of the lawn, skirting the dead dahlias and crossing the path to the water butt, alternating left and right as if the cat had weighed every step before taking it. You followed them in your dressing gown and wellingtons, torch in one hand, the mug of cold tea you had forgotten to put down in the other.

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They didn't stop at the compost heap, which was where you expected them to. They went under the gap in the fence where the hedgehog used to squeeze through, and into Mr Ferris's allotment, where the beanpoles stood in rows like a choir nobody had asked to sing. The prints crossed the black earth between the leeks and climbed the step of a potting shed whose door was propped open on a brick.

Inside, on a folded sack, the cat lay curled on a stack of seed packets with one paw over her nose. Mr Ferris sat on an upturned bucket with a flask between his boots, and he did not look surprised to see you. 'She comes for the warm,' he said. 'Every night this week. I leave her the crusts from my sandwiches and read her the seed catalogue. She doesn't mind the parsnips.'

You lifted her, all eleven pounds of her, and she let you, purring like a kettle on the boil. Walking home, you looked back once. The prints ran behind you in their careful left and right, a line of small dark marks in the frost that ended at your own back door, and you understood she had walked them so you would come looking.

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