Neo-traditional tattoo of a grey cat with pink ears and yellow eyes, shaded in black, on the outside of a calf.

Grey cat tattoo on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A seated grey cat with yellow eyes, a pink nose and pink-tipped ears fills the calf. Bold black shading defines the body and tail, while the grey fur is built up in flat, layered tones. The cat sits centred against plain skin and a pale background.

Neo-trad Calf Cat Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grey cat had been aboard the Marigold Jane since the night the crew pulled her, yowling, from a coal barge at Gravesend, and by the third week out of Bristol they agreed she had chosen them. She sat on the coil of hemp by the galley hatch and watched the cook peel potatoes as if she were marking his work. Nobody owned her. The mate, Tobias Crane, said a cat that picked a ship paid its passage in mice, and the mice were gone by the Azores.

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Off the Cape Verdes the wind died and stayed dead for nine days. The water barrels went green at the seams and the men grew quiet in the way sailors do when they start counting. On the ninth morning the cat came down from the rigging with her ears flat and her yellow eyes fixed on the sea to larboard, and she would not leave the rail. Crane's boy, Peter, swore he saw something under the water, long and slow, keeping pace with them.

Crane took a lantern to the bow and sat down beside her. He told her, plainly, that he had no biscuit to spare and no rum either, and that if she wanted an offering she would have to make do with his temper. The cat looked at him, then turned her head and gave one low call. Ahead, the flat grey water rippled, and a breeze came up from the south-west as though someone had lifted a hand from the sail.

They made Bristol twelve days late with the barrels half full. Crane never fed her from his plate again, and she never once asked him to. Each evening after that she sat on the same coil of rope, pink ears turned toward the harbour mouth, waiting for the next ship that needed a favour.