Traditional colour tattoo of a grey tabby cat with yellow eyes, a purple and teal bow, and a teal collar with a pearl necklace, on a limb.

Grey tabby cat with bow and pendant

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A grey tabby cat's head faces forward with yellow eyes, a pink nose and black whiskers. It wears a purple and teal bow with a teal gem on its head, a teal lace-like collar and a pearl necklace with a purple pendant below. Bold black outlines and flat colour fills sit over soft grey shading on the cat's face, and the design is centred on the skin.

Traditional Other Cat Tabby cat Bow Gem Collar Necklace Pearl Pendant Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The customs man at Harrow Bridge had one rule about carrying things over the water: a thing could cross only if it could be named. Sacks were named, and so were horses, barrels and bolts of wool. So when the grey cat came trotting down the middle of the planks one wet morning, with a purple bow tied over her ears and a string of pearls at her throat, he wrote down 'cat' in his ledger and waved her on. Nobody had ever tried to smuggle a cat.

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The lock-keeper's girl called her Ysolt and fed her herring heads on the north bank. Every market day the cat crossed to the south side and back again, and every day the pendant swung low against her chest, a violet stone in old brass. When the customs man asked what she carried, she sat down and washed her face, which he decided was an answer. What she carried was a letter sealed inside the brass, written by a widow in the north to her son across the water. The son had stopped writing home, and the widow had stopped waiting at the gate.

In October the customs man lifted the pendant on one finger and found the hinge the girl had shown him once, years before, without his noticing. He read the letter standing in the rain. He read it twice, then folded it small, put it back in the brass and clicked the hinge shut. He did not write anything in his ledger that day.

He walked the cat back to the north bank himself, carrying her under one arm like a parcel. At the widow's gate he set her down. Ysolt shook the water from her ears, sat up straight with the pearls catching the light, and climbed the gatepost in three neat movements to wait on the top rail, where she could see the road for anyone coming.