Flash sheet of five black line cat designs, including a seated cat, a kitten on a spiral, a cat with a music staff and a curled cat.

Five cat designs with music notes on a flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of five cat designs drawn in bold black brush-style linework on a plain off-white background. The designs show a seated cat in profile, two kittens curled with long swirling tails, a kitten beneath a large spiral, and a cat beside a wave of musical staff lines and notes. Shading is absent and the compositions are open, with flowing tails and simple negative space.

Cat Kitten Music note Treble clef Spiral Tail Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat got out of its basket somewhere between the car park and my booth, so by the time the woman reached the window it was sitting on my counter, tail curled round its feet like a spring left over from a clock. I asked her to put it back. She said it had been in the basket for four hours and had opinions about that.

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Her name was Ilse Varga and her passport was Hungarian, stamped twice already this year for the same orchestra in Lille, according to the pages. The cello case sat in the scanner lane behind her, too long and too tall for the frame, and the lorry drivers had begun to lean on their horns. She said she played in queues. Drivers calmed down, she said, when there was a cello. I believed her, which surprised me, because I had been on that shift eleven hours and had stopped believing most things by ten.

The cat walked the length of the counter, past the stamp pad and my cold tea, and stopped at the edge of the screen. It lowered its head towards the radio on the shelf, which was giving out nothing but static, then looked at me as if it knew the station was off. When I reached for the form it hooked a paw over my pen. Ilse laughed and said the cat only ever settled when a tune was about to start, and asked whether I wanted to hear the one her mother used to hum at this crossing when she was small.

She played four bars, low and slow, and the cat rose, stretched and dropped into the case beside the instrument, curling its tail round the neck of the cello until the spiral closed. I stamped her passport without reading the page properly. The barrier lifted. Through the window I watched the tail trail out of the open lid into the dark, and the music came back once across the car park before the road took it.