Colour Japanese style tattoo of a black and white cat with red and gold shide streamers and grey clouds, placed on the outer thigh.

Cat with shide streamers and clouds on a thigh

Japanese · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A black and white cat stretches down the leg, surrounded by grey cloud shapes and bound by red and gold shide paper streamers with circular shrine-style emblems. The linework is bold and dark, with smooth grey shading in the clouds and soft highlights on the cat's fur. Colour is concentrated in the red, yellow and gold accents against the black and white cat and the neutral skin tone.

Japanese Thigh Cat Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had got into the storeroom again, and by the time you reached the foot of the shrine steps, two of the white paper streamers had come down off the gate and were trailing in the mud like wet laundry. Mrs Hayashi from the rice shop stood at the bottom with her arms folded. She said nothing, which in Kawanishi was worse than shouting.

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You climbed the ladder with the bundle of shide under one arm and the red cord looped round your wrist. Your grandfather had taught you to fold them from a single strip, three pleats and a snip, so the paper zigzagged like lightning and gave the spirits something to catch on. The cat watched you from the beam above the altar, yellow-eyed, tail curled round the lantern hook as if it had been waiting for you all afternoon. Behind it, the painted clouds on the screen seemed to be drifting closer, the way they did when rain was coming over the hills.

It went easily enough once you stopped chasing it. You tied the first streamer round its middle with a bow your grandfather would have called vain, then the second round its forelegs, and the cat went limp as a sleeve. It did not struggle. It let you tie it the way the old men let the barber shave them, and when you lifted it down it dropped its weight into your palms and purred like a kettle left on the stove.

Mrs Hayashi had gone by the time you came out, but the gate was mended and the mud had been raked smooth. Someone had left a dish of milk and a rice cake wrapped in a leaf on the top step. You set the cat beside it. Behind you the bell rope swayed, and the streamers ticked against the post like a clock that had decided to forgive you.