Traditional black and grey tattoo of a woman with curled hair and a cat inside a heart shape, on the lower leg.

Heart-framed woman and cat on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A heart-shaped panel frames a woman's face and shoulders, with curled, shaded hair and a beauty mark beside her mouth. A striped cat sits at her left shoulder and one of her hands rests near its body. The bold outlines are filled with black and grey shading, and a pale green-grey wash sits behind the figures inside the heart.

Traditional Calf Woman Cat Heart Hand Portrait Curl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tent of Maldini's Travelling Wonders went up in a field outside Swindon in October, and nobody came to see it but the farmer's dog. Ada Quarrie, who had walked the high wire for thirty years and was now too stiff to climb it, sat on an upturned crate by the ring and counted the coins in the tin. There were eleven. The cat, a grey tabby called Sixpence, had been born under the big top and had never once been asked to perform, so she watched the empty benches with the seriousness of a magistrate.

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That night a man in a long coat came to the gate with a lantern and asked for the strongwoman. Ada told him the strongwoman had died in Bristol and the bearded lady had gone to work in a bakery in Leeds. He said he did not want a performer. He wanted someone who could keep a promise. He would pay in silver, and the silver would keep the tent standing until spring, if she agreed to hold one thing for him until he came back for it. She asked what the thing was. He lifted the lantern, and in the light she saw only his hand, pale and open, with nothing in it at all.

Ada said she would hold it. The man smiled, pressed three shillings into her palm, and walked off into the fog without a footstep she could hear. Sixpence jumped onto Ada's shoulder and purred against her neck, and Ada found that her hand had come up to rest against the cat's side, as if the empty palm were still holding something warm. In the morning the tin was full and the lantern was gone from the gate, and the circus stayed in that field until the grass grew over the ring.