Fine line tattoo of a cat's nose and whiskers in plum ink on the side of an ankle.

Cat whiskers on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Colour · Photo

A small tattoo of a cat's nose and whiskers sits on the outer side of an ankle, shown in a close photograph of a bare foot. The linework is thin and single-needle in style, with a simple curved nose, two dots and four whisker strokes on each side. The ink is a single dark plum tone against pale skin, and the plain bedsheet background keeps the focus on the design.

Fine line Ankle Cat Whiskers Cat face Nose

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in the valley could say how the cat came to Crane Hollow, only that by the time the roof fell in she was already living in the chapel crypt and the mice had given up the granary. She was a grey thing with a torn ear and a face like a thumbprint in clay, and she kept her whiskers long, because a ruined castle is mostly dark and whiskers are how a cat walks through it.

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Sir Alder Vane came up the hill one October with forty men and a charter that said the ruin was his. He had a clerk who counted the stones and a dog who barked at shadows. The cat watched them from the arrow slit above the gate. Each night the men lit fires in the great hall, and each night the clerk woke to find his ink pot tipped and his figures smeared, though nobody ever saw her do it.

On the thirteenth night the clerk went down the back stair with a lamp and no sense. The steps had no rail, and the dark swallowed the flame. He reached out, and something brushed his wrist, fine as thread, then pressed, then turned him gently by the elbow. He followed the feeling of it, step by step, until the stones ended at the old well, and a thin voice said, here, mind the lip. He felt the rim under his palm and thanked the air.

In the morning Sir Alder found the clerk sitting on the well's edge, and he would not say what had led him there. The cat was on the wall above, washing one paw. Sir Alder left the ruin standing, though he never went back in after dusk, and the valley children say that if you walk the back stair with your hand held out, something will touch your wrist and tell you where the stones are loose.