Geometric black linework cat on the thigh, with blue, green, magenta and purple watercolour washes behind the lines.

Geometric cat with watercolour fills on a thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A stretched, leaping cat outline is built from thin black lines forming triangular facets. Soft watercolour-style patches of blue, green, magenta and purple sit inside and behind the outline, fading toward the tail. The tattoo is shown in close view on pale skin, with the cat angled diagonally across the frame.

Geometric Thigh Cat Animal Triangle Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ines had been carrying the survey wire for three days when the cat appeared on the col above Hollin Gate, leaping from one shelf of slate to the next as if the mountain had been laid out for its benefit. She had expected the mist and the cold. She had not expected the animal to be made entirely of lines, black and thin, every joint a triangle, so that the wind came through it and the light went through it too.

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Her father had drawn maps of these passes for forty years, and he had a rule that a map must never show what was not there. So when the cat stopped on the ridge and looked back at her, she did what he would have done and wrote it down: a cat, three hundred paces, bearing north by north-west, wrong colour. The colour was the trouble. Where the cat's body thinned toward its tail, the mist itself seemed to take on paint, blue at the shoulders, a bruised green along the belly, then magenta, then a deep violet that bled out over the scree like spilt ink on wet paper.

She followed it down into the valley, where the cloud broke and the village lay under a single lamp. The cat went under the door of the inn and did not come out. Inside, the innkeeper's widow was counting coins into a tin and did not look up. "It comes every time someone measures this pass," she said. "Leave the wire on the step and it will take it for payment."

Ine left the wire on the step. In the morning the line was still there, coiled and tidy, and the cat was gone, and when she unrolled her father's map to correct the bearing, the ink of the ridge had taken on a faint blue wash, as if the mountain had decided to be drawn properly after all.