Black ink drawing of a grinning cat with a wide toothy smile, set inside an ornate oval frame topped with a crown and a MADNESS banner, with no body placement shown.

Grinning black cat in an ornate crowned frame

Black and grey · Flash

A solid black silhouette of a seated cat with a wide, toothy grin and whiskers sits within an oval, scrollwork frame topped with a crown. A banner along the bottom reads MADNESS in serif capitals. The linework is soft and watercolour-like in black ink on a pale background, with grey washes in the frame and no colour.

Cat Crown Frame Banner Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came down to the harbour at Skerrow the week the boats stopped coming home, and it sat on the wall with its tail wrapped round its feet as if it had been there since the rock was made. Nobody owned it. Nobody had ever seen it eat. The fishermen's wives said it had climbed out of the salt water with the fog, and the children said that if it grinned at you, it already knew which secrets you had hidden in the bread crock.

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The Queen of the island, who wore her crown even to the privy, sent for it. Her steward carried up the cliff road a silver frame, oval and thick with iron scrollwork, and set it on the wall beside the cat. The Queen said that whoever could look into that frame and not go mad would have the island. She had watched the sea take her husband and three sons and had not gone mad, so she believed she was the one to try.

The cat looked into the frame for a long time. Then it opened its mouth wider than any cat should, showing teeth like the rigging of a ship, and the Queen saw her own face grinning back at her from inside the oval. The crown on her head began to rattle with laughter. She laughed until the steward fled, until the gulls lifted off the rocks, until the whole bay was ringing with it.

In the morning the frame stood empty on the wall, and the Queen's crown lay in the shallows with the tide working through its points. Far out in the fog, something black sat on the water with its tail curled round it, grinning.