Colourful tattoo of a grey cat stalking a small mouse across a person's upper back, with splashes of blue, pink and orange ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat stalking a mouse on a back shoulder

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A grey cat with orange eyes crouches in profile on the left, its tail curling up and its paw reaching towards a small grey mouse on the right. The linework is loose and sketchy with soft shading, and the figures are overlaid with splashes and drips of blue, pink, orange and red ink. The composition sits across the shoulder blade area, with the cat's body wrapping around the edge of the figure and the mouse set apart at the end of a trail of blue ink.

Back Cat Mouse Whiskers Tail Paw Ink splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat in Marrowgate had been hungry for three winters, and everyone agreed it was the mill's fault for leaving the grain sacks open. On the night the clock tower struck eleven twice, she came down the cobbles of Tanner's Row with her tail up like a question mark, her orange eyes fixed on the lamplit window of the bakery. Inside, old Harriet Vane was counting coins into a tin, and behind her, in the flour bin, a mouse named Pim was counting crumbs.

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Pim had lived there longer than the bakery had had a sign. He knew every floorboard that sang and every draught that smelled of rain. He also knew the cat had been watching him for a week, and that she had a patience no living thing should own. So he did what mice have always done when they cannot outrun a problem: he went to the one place the cat could not follow, which was the wide blue river of spilt milk that ran under the back door when the delivery cart came late.

The cat followed anyway. She always did. Her paw came down through the air like a dropped lid, and Pim felt the wind of it on his whiskers as he slipped under the threshold into the cold alley. Behind him, the cat stopped at the edge of the light and considered the ink-dark puddles, the splashes of red lantern glass, the blue smear of the river reflecting the moon. She could not cross it without getting her feet wet, and she had never once in her life got her feet wet.

In the morning Harriet found a single grey hair on the step and a trail of blue footprints leading nowhere, and she said that cats in Marrowgate were getting cleverer every year.