Two pencil flash designs on translucent paper: a cat above an ornate shield with a rose and flowers, and a filigree heart locket with a key and ribbon, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat with rose and heart locket with key

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

Two separate drawings on translucent sheets. The left design shows a cat with a rose set within an ornate scrolled shield, with blossoms along the base. The right design shows a filigree heart-shaped locket with a ribbon and a decorative key below it.

Neo-trad Cat Rose Heart Key Ribbon Flower Scrollwork Shield

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the drain by your boots, the lot of you, it runs faster than the stalls do. Rain like this always brings the old story back up Sallow Street, and I'll tell it while the awnings drip, so hold your tea close and don't stare at the cat under the fishmonger's board. She's been listening longer than you have.

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Hester Quill sold rosebuds from a barrow by the clock tower, and she kept a grey tabby called Marrow who sat on the oilcloth like a magistrate. Hester wore a heart-shaped locket of worn silver, scrolled all over like a shield, and on a blue ribbon at her neck hung a little iron key. She said it opened the locket. She never once opened it, and nobody thought to ask why.

One wet Thursday a thin man in a borrowed coat asked for change and lifted the locket off its hook while she counted coppers. Marrow went after him without a sound. Under the wagons she went, up the drainpipe, over the wet slates, and when the man reached the grate by the tanners' yard he found her sitting on the bars with the locket in her teeth, the ribbon trailing down into the dark like a tail.

He never got it back. Hester came down with her umbrella, saw the cat and the grate and the key still swinging in the gutter, and laughed until she coughed. When she finally pried the locket open, it held no picture at all, only a folded note in her own hand saying the cat was owed a fish every Friday for life. Ask the fishmonger. He still pays it, and he still complains about the rain.