Black and white photo of a solid black silhouette tattoo of four upright cats in a row across the back of a neck.

Four black cat silhouettes on the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

Four solid black cat silhouettes stand upright side by side across the back of the neck, each with pointed ears and a short tail-less body. The shapes are filled flat with no visible linework or shading, and their heads sit at slightly different heights. The photograph is monochrome, with the subject's hair pulled up and ear plugs visible at the edges of the frame.

Neck Cat Silhouette Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the wasps, they're drunk on the windfalls this time of year, and don't you go picking up an apple that's been lying in the grass since Lammas. Sit down on that orchard wall where the stone's still warm. Now. Do you want to hear about the four black cats of Crabb's Hollow, or would you rather stand there with your mouth open?

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Old Mrs Pellow had the orchard then, forty trees of Bramley and Ashmead's Kernel, and the mice had her beaten every autumn. She went down to the Fair in Taunton and came back with four black kittens in a basket, all the same size, all with their ears pricked like they'd been told off. She named them for the seasons, though nobody could ever say which was which. She set them on the wall by the gate and told them: one of you keeps the gate, one walks the rows, one sleeps in the press, and the last one watches the lane for the man who owes her money.

For three summers they did their work. The mice thinned, the wasps went bothering somebody else, and the apples dropped clean into the long grass. Then came an August when the smallest cat would not come down from the wall. He just sat there, stiff as a fence post, staring up the lane at nothing. The others lined up beside him, heads at their different heights, as if they were waiting for a coach that had stopped running years before.

Then a dust cloud rose at the bend, and out of a van stepped the man who owed her money, grey as a sack of flour. He stopped dead when four pairs of green eyes turned on him at once. He paid her that very afternoon, in coins he counted twice, and he never came back. Mrs Pellow always said four cats on a wall can outwait any debtor in Somerset.