Colour tattoo of a hairless sphynx cat face wearing a crystal crown, with teal, pink and yellow shading, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Colourful sphynx cat with crystal on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a hairless sphynx cat's face, viewed straight on, with large amber eyes and a pink nose, topped by an orange and yellow crystal cluster. Black linework outlines the features and the cat's wrinkled skin, with ribbon-like swirls in pink, orange and yellow beneath the chin. The shading uses blended teal, blue, green and pink tones, and the design is centred on the upper leg against a plain skin background.

Neo-trad Thigh Cat Sphynx cat Crystal Ribbon Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Lower Hollin kept a cat without fur, so when the sphynx turned up on the bakery step, my mother set out a saucer of milk and told me not to name it. I named it anyway. Pell, after the bell at the churchyard gate, because it had the same tinny watchfulness and because it could sit so still.

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Its skin was wrinkled like a bruised plum and warm to the touch, and it wore a crystal on its head the way a bishop wears a mitre. Nobody saw where it came from. Grandmother said the wood at the village edge had grown stranger since the old well was bricked up, and that anything which walked out of the trees came with a little of the trees in it.

Every evening Pell went to the first oaks and sat with its ribbons of pink and gold trailing from its throat, and I followed as far as the stile. One November the frost took the ferns and the crystal turned cloudy. I knew from the narrowing of those amber eyes that something in the wood needed fetching back. I went past the stile with a lantern and a loaf wrapped in a cloth.

The clearing held a well with no bricks on it. Pell leapt onto the rim and stared down. The water was black, but a light rose through it, the same orange as the stone on the cat's head. I understood then that the crystal had never been a crown. It was a piece of the well's light, carried out into the world so that someone from the village would come looking for the rest. I knelt, put my hand in the cold water, and felt the light come up to meet it.