Hairless cat in a black circle on the chest

Dotwork · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A hairless cat's head in profile, with eyes closed and chin lifted, sits inside a solid black circle. The cat is rendered in fine stippled dotwork that builds soft grey shading across the face, ears and neck, while the surrounding circle is filled solid black. The photograph is taken close up on a bare upper chest and shoulder, with a thin silver chain at the neck and a dark background.

Dotwork Blackwork Chest Cat Sphynx cat Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat would not open its eyes for the merchant from Saltmarch, and that was the first mercy anyone had shown it in Morrowmere. Master Hask had taken it in off the harbour wall for a bowl of broth, bald as a boiled egg and mean as a gull, and now the merchant was counting silver onto my workbench one coin at a time. He wanted the creature for his wife, who wanted something warm to hold that would not shed on her silks.

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I was the glazier's girl, sixteen and sooty, and I had spent three winters watching that cat. It slept in the round window of the workshop, where the noon sun came through the lead and laid a bright disc on the floor. Every day at the hour bells it climbed into that light, lifted its chin like a bishop receiving a blessing, and shut its eyes. The merchant saw a cat that ignored him. I saw a cat that was entirely itself, and I did not know how to explain the difference to a man who counted in coin.

So when he reached for the basket, I put my hand flat on the lid. Master Hask looked at me as though I had lost my wits. I said the cat had to be in the sun by the bells or it would sicken, which was nonsense, but the merchant had heard stories about Morrowmere and stepped back. We waited. The bells rang twelve. The disc of light crept across the boards, the cat rose, stretched, and settled inside it with its face to the ceiling.

The merchant left without his cat and without his silver. Master Hask still grumbles about it on market days. But on clear afternoons I sit beside the window and watch the shadow of the lead come round to find that small grey head, and I think how the cat never once wondered whether it was worth keeping.