Black fine line tattoo of a cat-like head and outstretched limb beside a stippled moon, on the side of the ribs.

Fine line outline and stippled moon on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A thin single-line outline shows what appears to be a cat's head with whiskers or lashes and a long limb reaching upward. A small moon above it is shaded with dense dots and short strokes to suggest craters. The black linework and grey dotted shading sit on pale skin, with a black lace top along the upper edge of the frame.

Fine line Dotwork Ribs Cat Moon Outline

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, you, and mind the fire, because the next bit is where my grandmother always stopped and made us wait. The lighthouse on Scarrow Head had a keeper called Abel Tennant, and he had a grey cat named Morrow who would not come down off the gallery rail at night. Every evening Abel climbed the iron stairs with the lamp oil, and every evening the cat was up there before him, sitting with her paws tucked under her, watching the sea go black.

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One February the fog came in thick as wool and stayed three nights. The fog horn wailed and the boats stayed in harbour, and on the third night Abel found the lamp had gone out. The wick had drowned in its own oil. He was sixty-one years old and his hands shook, and he could not find the matches in the dark. Morrow sat on the rail and looked up, and that was when Abel saw she was not looking at the sea at all. She was looking at the moon, which had pushed one pale edge through the cloud, and she was reaching for it with one long foreleg as if it were a fish she had dropped back in the water.

Abel laughed then, and it surprised him. He said, all right, you want the moon, then give us a light down here. And the cat stretched her arm up until her claws caught the very edge of the cloud, and the cloud tore like wet paper, and the moon poured through onto the lamp room glass. Abel swears the beam went out over the water that night brighter than any oil could make it.

The boats came home. Nobody drowned. And ever after, if you climbed Scarrow Head on a clear night, you could see a grey cat on the rail with her arm still raised, and the moon, I'm told, has never once refused her.