A woman holding a tabby kitten shows a traditional-style sleeve of red roses and flowers on her forearm, with a small crescent moon on her hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Kitten held by a woman with a floral forearm tattoo

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman with long blonde hair, cropped so her face is not shown, holds a tabby kitten against a dark top. Her left forearm carries a sleeve of red and pink flowers with green leaves and a larger red rose at the wrist, and a small crescent moon sits on her hand. Dotted and fine botanical linework appears on her thigh at the lower right, and the image is shown in natural daylight against a pale surface.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Hand Thigh Kitten Cat Rose Flower Leaves Crescent moon Hair

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the brazier. Yes, the cat too. Her name was Tessa in the telling I had from my mother, though the market women of Miletus called her Moonfoot, because she had one white paw and no patience for the rest of the world.

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Moonfoot belonged to a rose-seller named Kallias, who kept his stall beneath the harbour wall where the boats came in pale with salt. Every evening he watered his roses from a bronze jug, and every evening the kitten sat on the rim of the cistern and batted at the crescent of the new moon as it floated in the water. She was certain it was a fish that had lost its scales. She was certain she would catch it.

One night she leapt. The jug went over, the roses went under, and by morning the cistern held a scatter of petals and a moon that would not stay put. Kallias wept, then shouted, then sat down on an upturned crate and laughed until he coughed. Moonfoot, dripping, climbed onto his knee and looked at him with eyes like two pale lamps on the mole.

The fisherman's daughter who sold him rope that morning said a cat who could not keep a moon was no cat at all. Kallias said he did not care. He pressed the petals flat between two tiles and sold them as the only roses in Miletus that had kissed the sky. Some say the cat is still down there, batting at the water. I say she is only waiting for the next thin moon to forgive her.