Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a cat holding a sword, set within red and black flames across the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat with sword and flames on a foot

Japanese · Other · Mixed · Photo

A cat with white and dark markings holds a sword low on the foot, with its body partly wrapped in stylised red and black flames. The linework is bold and dark, with solid black outlines and smooth shading on the fur and flames. Red dominates the flames, with black, grey and white used for the cat and the surrounding background.

Japanese Other Cat Sword Flame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had been stealing lamp oil from the Nakagawa shrine since the spring the river stopped freezing. Mrs Hayashi, who sold tofu at the bridge, swore it could set its own tail alight out of spite. Nobody believed her until her neighbour's barn went up on a still night, and the only thing standing in the yard afterwards was a black and white cat, tail blazing like a torch, a short blade balanced across its paws.

Keep reading

It was no ordinary blade. A wandering ronin had left it in the shrine's lacquered box the winter before, a wakizashi with a cracked guard, and the cat had found it the way cats find anything warm. Each night after that it walked the village boundary with the sword held low, the flames coiling behind it like red silk, and the dogs kept their mouths shut.

Kenji, the boy who trimmed the shrine lanterns, followed it one evening and found it waiting for him on the bridge. It did not attack. It laid the blade across his sandals with great formality, the way a magistrate sets down a verdict, then slipped off into the reeds. By morning the thieves who had been burning the rice stores were gone, and their wooden clogs stood stacked neatly on the shrine steps.

Kenji kept the sword. He oiled it on Sundays and never let it slide fully into its sheath, so on cold mornings a thin line of steam rose from the blade, and the village said that was the cat still keeping watch on the road.