Black outline drawing of a cat-faced skull with a heart-shaped nose, ribcage and crossed arm bones ending in X-marked hands, shown as a flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat skull and crossbones line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A black outline drawing of a cartoon skull with cat ears, whiskers, a heart-shaped nose and a small row of teeth. Beneath it sit a ribcage and two crossed arm bones with splayed hands, each bone ending in an X mark. The linework is uniform and bold on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Skull Cat Crossbones Ribcage Bone Heart Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell Hooper kept a tally of her cat's lives on the back of an old tide table, one notch per disaster, and by the spring she had made seven marks and nothing to show for them but a bad temper and a torn ear. Pilchard had fallen off the chandlery roof, been shut in a flour sack, and once come home from the Thames wearing a length of fishing net like a stole. Each time he limped back to the step, sat down, and looked at her as though she were the careless one.

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The eighth life went on a Tuesday. Nell found him stiff on the cobbles outside the Crown, paws splayed, mouth open, and she went to fetch the sexton's boy to dig a hole. But when she knelt to lift him she saw that the old scar over his eye had split, and beneath it was a face so sorrowful and so ridiculous, a grin of bone under a cat's round ears, that she laughed until she had to sit down in the gutter. Whatever he was, he was not finished yet.

She carried him home in her apron. Pilchard woke at the kitchen fire, stretched, and walked straight to the tide table. He sat on it, sniffed at the notches, and then, with great deliberation, pressed a paw into the ink of the eighth mark and dragged it sideways into a cross. Two crossed bones, a heart, and a row of tiny teeth.

He has been down to his last life for forty years now, according to the chandler, who swears the count is simply wrong. Nell has stopped writing the numbers down.