Black and grey linework tattoo of a startled cat with a yarn ball on the upper arm, shown in a close black and white photo.

Cat with wide eyes and yarn ball on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A cat with wide eyes and an open mouth sits on a ball of yarn, with the strand trailing in loose loops down the arm. The cat's body is filled with dense parallel lines that suggest shading, while the yarn ball uses crossing lines for texture. The image is a black and white close-up that centres the tattoo on the upper arm and shoulder.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Rain had been coming off the canvas awnings since six, and Maud Ferrier had given up pretending the wool was dry. She sat behind the trestle table at Cathedral Street market, sorting hanks of undyed Shetland into piles by weight, while her cat Pilchard watched from the top of the ball basket with the wild-eyed look he wore whenever the sky went grey.

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He had never liked the rain. Thunder, a dropped pair of scissors, a man selling phone cases two stalls down shouting the price of everything: Pilchard reacted to all of it the same way, flattening his ears and opening his mouth in a silent, outraged O. Maud called it his opera face. The customers loved it. A woman from the bakery had bought a skein of blue merino on Tuesday just to see him do it again.

Around eleven the rain turned to hail, the awnings boomed, and a bolt of tangerine yarn rolled off the table and unspooled across the wet cobbles. Pilchard launched himself after it. Maud watched the thread run out under the stalls, through a pram wheel, round a stack of crates, and tie itself in loops around the leg of a folding chair where a boy was sheltering with a paper bag of chips.

The boy looked up, bemused, at the cat sitting on the yarn ball like a king on a throne. "He's yours?" Maud nodded. "Then you'd better come and get your wool," she said, and for the first time all morning, Pilchard looked almost pleased.

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