Black and grey traditional tattoo of a heart holding a clasped human hand and a paw, with the words Boys Whatever above and Cats Forever below, on a limb.

Heart with clasped hand and paw and banner text

Traditional · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A tattoo of a shaded heart containing a crescent moon and two small sparkles, with a human hand clasped around a clawed paw across its centre. The words BOYS WHATEVER sit above and CATS FOREVER below, with a flower and two leaves at the base. Bold outlines and stippled, grey-shaded fills are used throughout, with no colour ink.

Traditional Other Heart Hand Paw Cat Crescent moon Star Flower Leaves Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nan kept one rule for the allotment: nobody came through the back gate after dark except Moss. He was a grey tom with a torn ear and a low opinion of everyone, my cousin Dean included, which is why Dean spent the summer of the heatwave trying to win him over with fish paste and bad jokes.

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I took the night shift that August, watering the leeks and squash while Nan was in hospital with her hip. Every evening at eleven the moon came up over the shed roof as if someone had switched it on, and every evening Moss sat on the water butt and stared at me like I owed him money. Dean turned up with a torch and a tin of pilchards and announced that he'd been reading about cats. "They like to be asked," he said. "Not chased. Asked."

So he perched on an upturned crate, held out one hand palm down, and didn't move for forty minutes. I thought it was the dumbest thing I had ever seen. Then Moss stepped down off the butt, walked the length of the bed past the sprouts, and pressed one soft paw into Dean's knuckles like he was signing for a parcel. Dean didn't breathe. Neither did I. The stars over the plots were the only things that looked unimpressed.

Nan came home in October and asked who had been feeding him. Dean said nobody, he'd just been asked nicely. She laughed until she had to sit down, then told us the cat had been trying to get in since the day he was born and she'd never once got a word out of him. That night Moss sat on the kitchen sill with his paw against the glass, and Dean, pretending not to care, left the back door open an inch.