Hairless cat head with geometric triangles on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A hairless cat's head in side profile fills the forearm, with its wrinkled skin and ears shaded using fine stippled dots and a bold outline. A faceted diamond shape marks the eye, and two overlapping outlined triangles extend behind the head to the right. The work is entirely black and grey, with soft dotted gradients giving the skin its texture against the pale arm.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Cat Animal Triangle Diamond Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the bucket, it's full of cold tea, and keep your hands where I can see them. Aye, that's the cat on the stool. Her name was Sorrow to the Dutch crew and Mrs Pell to me, and she came aboard at Valparaiso in a crate meant for oranges. Ugly as a boiled glove, she was, with skin folded like old sailcloth and not a hair on her anywhere.

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She slept curled against the chart table where the lamp kept her warm, and the navigator, Tobias Crane, couldn't abide her near his instruments. He had a set of brass dividers he kept in a three-sided box, and he swore a ship could be found by triangles alone: a sight, a second sight, and the sum of the angles between. The cat watched those dividers the way other cats watch string. Crane said she was counting.

Then came the storm off the Horn. The lamp guttered out, the compass card went round like a drunk, and Crane's hands shook so badly he couldn't hold the glass. The cat walked straight across the chart, past the brass and the spilt ink, and sat down square on our reckoned position. Her one good eye caught the lamp and threw it back like cut stone. Crane followed that stare, took his bearings from the two triangles, and found the land was never where the log said it was.

When we raised Staten Island at dawn, the cat was asleep on the dividers, warm as bread. Crane wrote in the log: one cat, one true course, one debt paid. Nobody argued with her after that, and nobody sat in her chair.