Black ink leopard print spots tattooed down the nape of a woman's neck, photographed from behind with her hair in a bun.

Leopard print spots on the nape of the neck

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind, with her hair tied up in a bun and wearing a black camisole. A cluster of dark, filled spot shapes forms a leopard print pattern running down the nape of her neck and onto the upper back. The image is warm-toned and the black ink stands out clearly against the skin.

Neck Leopard print Spots Animal print

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The leopard came up from the Lisbon boat in a crate marked with a merchant's name nobody in Halse Cove could pronounce, and the crate was lighter than it should have been when the men carried it up the slip. Old Tamsin Penhale said the animal had been bought by a travelling showman who went bankrupt on the quay, and that the cat would eat no meat unless a man in a boat had caught it. So the fishermen fed it mackerel, and it lived in the net loft above the salting sheds, where the tar smell kept it warm.

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Every morning before the fleet went out, the cat walked to the end of the mole and sat with its tail wrapped round its feet. The boats it watched came home. The ones it ignored, the men said, had put out with their hands unwashed. Nobody believed this, but nobody sailed without looking to see whether the cat was there. Tamsin's grandson, Eli, a boy with salt crusted in his hair, counted the dark rosettes along its flank each morning to pass the time, and never got the same number twice.

In the hard March the herring failed, the fleet went out four days running and came back with nothing but wet rope, and the men began to talk of blaming the cat. They came to the loft with lanterns and a rope of their own. Eli stood in the doorway and told them the cat was counting the boats, one spot for each, and that the total changed because the boats kept changing their minds about the weather. Nobody understood him, so they went home and slept badly.

On the fifth morning the water broke silver under the mole and the nets came up so heavy the winch groaned. The leopard went down to the slip, looked at each boat in turn, and walked back up to the loft without a backward glance. Eli chalked the catch on the loft door: eleven boats, eleven full hulls, and one small mark beside them for the cat, which had never once been counted by anyone but him.