Realistic grey cat with yellow eyes and two pink roses on a shoulder blade, set against blue and pink watercolour splashes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grey cat portrait with pink roses on a shoulder

Realism · Shoulder · Colour · Photo

A realistic grey cat with yellow eyes faces forward at the centre, with pink roses on the upper left and lower right. Soft watercolour washes in pink, lilac and teal sit behind the subject, with small sparkle marks beside the cat's face. Shading on the fur and petals is smooth and detailed, and colour ink dominates the composition.

Realism Shoulder Back Cat Rose Watercolour splash Sparkle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the peat smoke in your faces. No, the grey cat is not ours to keep. She belongs to Morag Lennie up at the light on Hallan, and she has yellow eyes because the sun once went down into them and never fully came back out.

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Every June Morag planted roses along the kirk wall, pink ones, the kind that smell of sugar and rain. The cat would lie between them in the afternoons, as still as a stone, while the sea below turned the colour of a bruise going healthy, lilac and then teal. Nobody thought much of her until the fog came in over the Sound the autumn the Keir boys went out after the mackerel.

It came down thick as wool. The men on the shore could hear the boats and not see them, and the bell on the point gave out a sound like a cow stuck in a bog. Then a small light came along the harbour wall, low and steady, and the fog parted before it like a curtain. It was the cat, walking ahead with her eyes lit like two lamps, stopping at every rock so the boys could follow her. Sparks of spray flew off the stones around her, and the whole wall glittered like a sky full of stars.

They came in safe, all three of them, and Morag fed the cat a whole herring on the step. Ever since, when the sea goes pink and teal at dusk and the roses look as if they might drift off the wall, you know she is out there counting the boats in. Mind your step on the way home. She will see you.