Black and grey tattoo of a cat silhouette framed by ornate lace-style floral filigree on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat silhouette within lace-style floral filigree

Dotwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid cat silhouette sits in the centre of the design, left as unshaded skin, with a seated pose and raised head. Dense black outlines and stippled dotwork build the surrounding lace-like scrolls and flower shapes, with soft grey shading across the petals. The design is rendered in black and grey ink and spreads diagonally across the upper back.

Dotwork Back Cat Silhouette Lace Floral Filigree Scroll Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on that bench, the one with the iron lace gone rusty under the paint, and mind the pigeon, he thinks the seat is his. Now. Do you want to hear about the cat of Mossgate Junction, or will you sit there looking at your phone until the 9.14 decides to show its face? Thought so.

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Nobody ever named her. The porters called her Madam because she sat on the signal box steps like a magistrate, back to the platform, head up, watching the lines run off into the fog. She was white once, and then she was the colour of old piano keys, and in forty winters she never once came down to be stroked. Mrs Ada Pell kept the refreshment room and left her kippers on a saucer on the sill. That was the whole of their friendship, and it was enough for both of them.

Then in the February of the big frost the lines froze solid, and the ironwork along the canopy grew ice ferns so fine you could not tell where the metal stopped and the frost began. A boy came off the night mail with a telegram for his mother and no coat. He sat down beside Madam's step because it was the only warm place, the boiler breath coming up through the grate. Ada brought him tea. Madam did not move. She only turned her head, very slowly, the way you turn to a clock that has stopped, and looked down the empty track as though a light might yet come out of the white.

The train came at four. Ada swore it was the 9.14, which was impossible, and I won't argue with her, because the boy went home on it and came back every year after to sit on that step. Madam was gone by the spring. Some say she walked off the end of the platform into the frost. Ada said she had simply finished watching.