Black and grey traditional flash design of a heart holding a hand clasping a cat paw, with a crescent moon, stars, a flower and the words Boys Whatever Cats Forever.

Heart with clasped hand and cat paw

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A black and grey drawing of a tattoo design shows a heart framed by a scalloped outline, containing a night sky with a crescent moon and small stars above a hand clasping a cat's paw. Below the heart sits a bold flower with two leaves, and curved lettering above and below reads Boys Whatever Cats Forever. The linework is bold and clean, and the shading uses stippled dots and fine hatching to create tone within the heart.

Traditional Heart Crescent moon Star Hand Paw Cat Flower Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the cat, she's heard this one more times than I have. Now. The winter the frost came down on Hollin Farm so hard the water troughs cracked like plates, there was a boy called Tom Ashby who was meant to be feeding the ewes, and instead he was sat on the byre step with his boots full of snow, watching the lane for his father's lantern.

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Ah, you want to know about the cat. Her name was Mab, a grey thing with one torn ear and no manners at all. Every evening she'd walk down the lane to the gate and sit there, looking back over her shoulder at the boy as if to say, come on then. And every evening he shook his head, because his father had told him never to go past the gate after dark, and his father had never once told him a lie.

Then the moon came out. Not a full one, mind, just a thin paring of a moon, and the stars came out round it as if someone had scattered salt on a black cloth. Tom saw Mab lift her paw from the snow, and he stood up and took it, the way you'd shake a neighbour's hand, and she let him. Her pads were warm as bread. They walked together down the lane until the lantern light showed through the hedge, and there was his father, stumbling across the field with a ewe over his shoulders and his face wet with frost.

The old man set the ewe down, looked at the cat, and said nothing at all. He just pulled off his glove and held out his bare hand, and Mab put her paw in it, and that was the end of the argument. So if you're ever out past the gate when the moon's thin, look for a grey cat with a torn ear. She'll be waiting, and she'll take your hand, if you let her.