Black and grey realism tattoo across a bare back showing a small girl in a dress beneath a tall tree, with a grinning cat on a branch above, placed on the back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Girl under a tree with grinning cat on a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large tattoo covers most of the back. A small girl in a knee-length dress stands at the lower left beside a tree trunk, and a grinning striped cat lies along a branch in the upper right of the tree canopy. The linework and soft shading are detailed, with fine highlights in the foliage and bark, and the image is entirely in black and grey ink.

Realism Back Girl Dress Tree Cat Branch Foliage Bark Grin

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Harrowmere could remember the cat arriving, only that by the time the orchard was sold for building it had already claimed the old plum tree at the bottom of Cinder Lane. It lay along the top bough like a dropped scarf, striped the colour of wet slate, and it grinned whenever anyone came up the path with a ladder.

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Dennis Pell came in October with a clipboard, a tape measure and a cheerful disregard for folklore. He found Peg Ashdown already sitting in the roots, nine years old, pinafore buttoned wrong, a paper bag of windfalls in her lap. She told him the cat had said the tree was not finished yet, and that a man with a saw would be sorry. Dennis laughed and told her to run home for her tea.

He came back at dusk with a bow saw. The blade bit once, then skidded off the bark as though the wood had grown harder in the last minute. When he looked up, the grin was hanging in the canopy above him, wider than any cat's had a right to be, and at the foot of the trunk the girl's shadow lay across the grass with its hand held out, as if waiting for a plum.

The houses went up around the orchard that winter, forty-two of them with carports and square lawns. Dennis's site notes survive in the council archive. Beside the plum tree, in his neat block capitals, he wrote RETAINED, OWING TO CAT, and underneath, in smaller letters, that the girl always came at four and always left a plum on the bottom step.