A clenched fist with blue-grey blackletter-style lettering reading CATS MEOW across the knuckles, with a turquoise painted fingernail on the thumb below.

Cats Meow lettering across knuckles

Traditional · Hand · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a clenched fist with the words CATS MEOW tattooed across the knuckles, one or two letters per finger. The letters use bold, angular blackletter-style forms with dark outlines and pale blue-grey shading. The fist fills the frame against a plain black background, with a thumb and a turquoise fingernail visible beneath it.

Traditional Lettering Hand Text Letter Fist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The drip from the big top's torn canvas lands in your bucket with a note like a struck spoon, and you are counting the beats between drops when Mr Pargeter comes stamping across the sawdust with a handbill held out in front of him like a summons. The ring is empty apart from you, two elephants dozing on their feet, and a heap of wet netting that used to be the trapeze. "Read it," he says. "Out loud. Tell me what it says."

Keep reading

The bill is three years old and yellowing at the corners. Someone cut the lettering by hand, fat and angular, shaded in grey-blue ink so the words look like they are standing in cold water. CATS MEOW, it shouts, with a drawing of Admiral the tabby walking the high wire with a herring in his mouth. Three sisters once filled a week of takings in Leeds on the strength of that bill. You were the one who could read the cats, who knew when Admiral would sulk and when he would walk the wire for a sardine.

The cats were sold to a pet shop in Hull last spring. Admiral went first, then the rest, until only Duchess was left, a grey, stiff-hipped old thing who had not so much as sat on a ball in two summers. Pargeter wants one last show before the tent comes down for good, six days' notice on the posters, a fiddler and a clown he has already talked into staying for free. You say yes mostly to shut him up.

Opening night there are seven people in the stands, one of them a dog. You lift Duchess onto the platform and wait, and for a long moment nothing happens. Then she yawns, looks at the empty tiers as though they owe her money, and walks the wire as slowly and as grandly as a duchess should. The seven of them stand up anyway. Pargeter, weeping openly into his moustache, says it's the cat's meow, and for once he is right.