Fine line flash sheet of five cats curled up asleep inside circular frames, drawn in black linework on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Five curled cat designs in circles

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of five line drawings, each showing a cat curled up and sleeping inside a circular frame, arranged in a loose ring pattern. The linework is fine and even, with minimal shading, and the tails and paws are the main details in each design. The image is entirely black ink on white, with no colour.

Fine line Cat Sleeping cat Tail Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The big top at Haskell's had lost its canvas by the autumn, so we did the last winter season under a tarpaulin the colour of weak tea. Nobody paid to see the lions any more. Nobody paid to see much of anything. What we had left was five cats and a row of wooden hoops, and Mother said the hoops were the only honest thing in the show.

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The cats were called Pim, Dunstan, Ada, Velvet and the grey one nobody would name. They slept rolled tight in the hoops between acts, tails wrapped round their noses, each one a perfect circle as if the cats had been asked to become the ring itself. Dunstan could sleep through a brass band. Ada woke only for the smell of mackerel, so I learned to keep the tin open for her in the wings.

In February the council man came with his clipboard and his cold hands and said the field was wanted for a car park. Mother asked him to wait for the second act. He stood at the rail while Velvet uncurled, stretched the length of the sawdust, and walked across the rim of a hoop as though she had laid the road herself. He wrote nothing down. He just watched her go.

We sold the hoops to a primary school in Bury, and the cats went with the last of the tents to a farm near Ely where the barns stay warm. I still have the grey cat's hoop, scuffed and paler where her tail used to lie. Nothing I own fits as neatly as an animal that has already decided where its edge is.