Traditional-style tattoo of a black sitting cat patterned with red, yellow and green flowers, across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Folk-art cat with flowers on upper back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A black silhouette of a seated cat fills the upper back, with yellow whiskers and facial details. Its body and tail carry red, yellow and green flower motifs, and sunflowers sit on the haunches. Bold solid outlines and flat black fill give the piece a folk-art look against the plain skin.

Traditional Back Cat Flower Sunflower Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had been sitting on the porch rail of the Halvard Motor Lodge since before the heat lifted off the blacktop, and when you pulled in at six with the temperature needle pinned in the red, it turned its head and watched you the way a landlady watches a man with no luggage. Its body was black as a stove lid, slashed with a garland of red and yellow blooms that climbed from chest to tail. You stood beside the Chevy with the bonnet ticking and decided it was the only thing for forty miles that looked like it had an opinion about you.

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The woman who came out wiping her hands was Odile Greer, and she had painted the cat herself, along with every tin tray and shutter in the place. She looked at the steam rising from your radiator and said the water pump had gone, and the nearest mechanic was in Carrow Wells, a day's walk in this heat. She offered a bed and a trade instead: a crate of sunflower seed to carry to a merchant who had stopped answering her letters. In return she would fix the car with a part from her shed.

Next morning the crate sat on the back seat, and the cat rode on the dashboard, held in place with a strip of masking tape. Past the salt flats the road ran straight and white, and the sunflowers planted along the verge turned their heads together to follow the sun east, the same way the painted ones on the cat did. You found yourself steering by them without meaning to, and every few miles the cat's yellow whiskers caught the light and seemed to twitch.

The merchant had died in the spring. His widow took the crate without ceremony, then pressed a small tin tray into your hands, painted with the same black cat and a ring of sunflowers. On the back, in Odile's careful capitals, were the words CARRY THE FLOWERS, KEEP THE CAT. You drove back east with the tray wedged under the seat and the cat on the dashboard, and every time the road bent toward the sun, the painted blooms turned with it.