Colour tattoo of a grey cat with green eyes and a small mouse, set against pink and purple paint-like splashes on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grey cat with pink and purple splashes on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A grey cat with green eyes crouches over a small mouse, shown in a stretched, stylised pose. The cat is rendered with soft grey shading and black linework, while loose pink and purple brushstrokes sweep behind it. The tattoo fills the upper arm and extends towards the shoulder, photographed close up against a blurred background.

Neo-trad Upper arm Cat Mouse

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

By the fourth night without the boats, the mice had taken the net loft at Skerry Quay, and Mags Rennie had stopped pretending she could sleep through the chewing. The grey cat that had turned up in March, thin as a mooring rope with eyes the colour of sea glass, came to her door when she called, though it never once came when she called it by name.

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Her husband Tam said the cat was no use, a fishwife's pet that lived on scraps from the gutting table. But the herring had gone deep past the Skerry bank, the fleet was coming home short, and the nets were going soft with rot and nibbling. Mags took a dish of salt pork up the ladder anyway and set it on the beam where the light came through the slats in bars of pink and mauve.

The cat watched her from the rafters. Then it stretched itself long along the timber, the way a cat does before it commits to something, until its body seemed to pour down the wall like paint from a loaded brush. It dropped without a sound. Below, in the brown tangle of netting, something small squeaked once and went still.

Tam came in on the morning tide with his hold full and climbed the loft ladder to find his wife asleep among the mesh, the cat curled against her collarbone. On the boards beside them lay a single mouse, laid out neatly, as if it had been delivered with a receipt. He looked at the empty pork dish and then at the cat, which opened one green eye and did not move. "Feed it properly, then," he said, and for once Mags did not argue.