Black and grey tattoo of a cat skull with anatomical labels, drawn in an engraved illustration style, on the outer thigh.

Labelled cat skull on a thigh

Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cat skull is shown in side and front views, with the upper skull above a separate lower jaw and small italic abbreviations marking anatomical features. The linework is fine and hatched, with denser shading in the eye sockets and nasal area to give the bone volume. The tattoo is black and grey and sits on pale skin with a plain background.

Thigh Cat Skull Teeth Anatomy Bone

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The engraver wanted the plate by Friday, so Ada Finch sat under the gas lamp with the cat's skull turned on its side. She had lettered the jaw already, small and upright: c for canine, pm for the premolars, an where the muscle caught. The tom had come from the dock sheds, boiled clean and drying on the cellar shelf, its cord tag still reading ROOK in Halloran's careless capitals.

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On Tuesday the cord was found cut and tucked under the tray. On Wednesday the lower jaw lay a little apart from the rest, as if someone had tried to close it and given up. Ada did not hold with the porters' stories about the cellar, but a labelled drawing was a promise, and she did not like a specimen going missing before it was finished.

She stayed late on Thursday. At ten the gas hissed low and something landed on the board without a sound, a grey cat with a torn ear. It sat on her plate and looked at the drawing, not at her. In the morning every abbreviation had been retraced in a hand that was neither hers nor Halloran's, and beneath the jaw stood a new letter she did not recognise.

She did not ask the engraver about it. She inked the plate as it stood, and under the lower jaw she left the new letter, a small neat r with a tail curling back toward the teeth. The cellar window stayed open after that, and some nights she heard the soft drop of paws on the stone stairs, coming to see whether the picture had been finished right.