Japanese-style flash drawing of a black and white cat holding a sword, with a woman's head and pink flowers on its body, set beneath a gold halo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat with sword and woman's head design

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A coloured drawing of a black and white cat holding a blue-bladed sword, with a pale-faced woman's head and long dark hair emerging from its body. Pink flowers with green leaves and dark swirling clouds fill the cat's body, and a gold halo sits behind its head. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills are used, with a few lines of Japanese calligraphy on the right against a grey textured background.

Japanese Traditional Cat Sword Woman Pink flower Flower Halo Cloud Calligraphy Leaves Hair

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and keep your hands away from the coals, because this is the part where the cat comes down off the dune with a stolen sword and a face that does not belong to him. The road below us was a caravan track then, the bores ran dry every second summer, and a black and white cat called Mori lived in the ruins of a tea house where the wind had taken the roof.

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One windless night Mori went to the well at Sefid Rud and found a woman sitting on its lip with her hair loose and her feet bare. She had walked in from the salt pans after her husband's cart went under in a storm, and she was singing to the water so it would rise. Mori had heard that singing for three seasons. He had no voice to answer with, so he lifted the caravan master's sword from the sand where it lay, carried it in his teeth to the edge of the light, and asked the well for a face that could speak. The well, which had been swallowing people's wishes for a century, gave him the one that had gone down with the cart. The moon came over the dune and sat on his head like a gold bowl.

He wore that face up the dune road for a month, combing the pink petals out of its hair, and it told the drivers their cart-men were still walking. At dawn he always returned it to the well, his own whiskers came back to his jaw, and the sword was left on the stones with a line of writing scratched into the blade.

Nobody here has ever read that writing, though my grandmother swore it said the road would be kind to anyone who stopped to listen. So when you cross at night, leave a little water in a cup at the well, and if you see a cat with a gold halo walking the dune, do not stop him. He is only returning a face.