Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a dapper cat in a top hat, monocle and bow tie, framed in an ornate orange oval.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Dapper cat in top hat and monocle

Neo-trad · Other · Colour · Photo

A cat with a grey tabby face and one amber eye wears a black top hat with a red band, a monocle on a beaded chain, a red bow tie and a dark waistcoat and jacket. The figure sits inside an oval frame with an orange and gold border and scrollwork at the base, set against a pale blue sky-like background. Bold outlines, smooth colour fills and soft shading give it a classic, painterly look.

Neo-trad Other Cat Top hat Monocle Bow tie Frame Chain Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, sit down, and mind the candle, for Brother Anselm never once let a flame near the scriptorium without a fight. You want the tale of Oswin, then. Everyone at Saint Brannoc's knows the cat, though few have seen him in his Sunday clothes.

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He was a grey tabby with one eye the colour of stewed apricot and the other the colour of the sky before rain, and he came to us the winter the river froze over the mill. Prior Ceolwulf kept him out of the kitchens on account of his temper and out of the chapel on account of his opinions. So Oswin took to the library, where the books were warm and nobody minded a cat asleep on the lectern, provided he did not sleep on the psalter. He did, of course, every day.

Then came the painter from Bristol, a thin man with ink on his cuffs, sent to make a likeness of the abbot for the benefactor's wall. Oswin watched him mix his colours for three days and said nothing. On the fourth morning he appeared in the cloister wearing the old hat Brother Fergal had left under the bench, a monocle he had somehow lifted from the infirmarian, and a red bow tie stolen from the wash line. The painter nearly dropped his brush. "Paint me," said Oswin, or so Brother Fergal swore, "and paint me properly."

And the painter did. That oval frame on the wall of the refectory is his work, and if you look close at the gilt scrolls you will see a tiny mouse tangled in the lower curl, which was the price of the commission. The abbot never did get his portrait. The benefactor got a cat, and the cat, I am told, has been insufferable ever since.