Close-up of a small black fine-line tattoo of a cat with a curled tail, placed on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line cat on the upper chest

Fine line · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A close-up of the upper chest and collarbone area shows a small, single-line tattoo of a cat in profile with a long curved tail. The linework is thin, black and even, with no shading. The skin is shown against a maroon top and a soft, blurred background of pale buildings.

Fine line Chest Cat Line art Animal

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit still, and don't interrupt me the way your uncle does, or I'll stop at the lock and you can walk the rest of the cut. Right. The cat was called Tallow, and she came aboard at Braunston in a coal sack, which tells you what kind of cat she was. She had no patience for the tiller and less for the ropes. What she liked was the cabin roof in the evening, when the chimney was warm and the fields went grey across the water.

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Your great-grandfather swore she could tell which lock keeper was coming by the way he walked. At Dunmere she would be up on the gate beam before anyone else saw him, her tail curling round like the end of a question mark. Nobody taught her that. She simply looked at the world as though it were one long line she had decided to follow, and she never once lifted that tail off the path, not for dogs, not for ducks, not for the bargee's wife with her broom.

The winter the cut froze to the depth of a man's hand, we were stuck above the top lock with nothing but tinned peas and a sack of potatoes gone soft. Tallow went off across the ice at dusk and didn't come back. We walked the towpath three days calling her name. On the fourth morning your great-grandfather found her sitting on the old wharf wall, watching a heron stand as still as a fence post, her tail wrapped neatly round her feet as if she had all the time in the world.

He carried her home under his coat, and she lived another eleven years. The boat still has the chalk mark he made on the cabin door that week, a little cat with a tail that never ends.