Black and grey realism tattoo of a lynx head centred on a person's upper back, with ear tufts and a steady gaze.

Lynx head on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large lynx head is tattooed centrally on the upper back, facing the camera with a direct, steady gaze. The fur is built up with soft grey shading and fine dark strokes around the ears, cheeks and whiskers, giving depth to the face. The design is entirely black and grey against warm skin, and the plain background keeps the focus on the tattoo.

Realism Back Cat Wildlife Animal portrait Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the harbour at Skerrow Mouth by the things that watch it. The gulls fight over the gutted fish at the slip, the seals sulk under the pier lamps, and on the north breakwater, where the wind has stripped the grass to bare rock, there is the lynx. Nobody on the fleet had seen one come down from the hill before the winter the Morag went missing. Old Dougie Pirie said it had come for the nets. You thought that was nonsense until you saw it sitting there at dawn, ear tufts lifted, watching the mouth of the bay as though it were counting.

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Your job is the tally board. Every skipper radios his catch in, and you chalk it under the boat's name on the board by the fish market, boats in, boats out, the same way every evening. This autumn the chalk keeps coming up one short. The Morag is still on the board from the first week of February, her name rubbed grey by your sleeve. You have stopped wiping it. Each evening the lynx settles at the end of the pier and turns its head to follow the boats as they round the light, and it never once looks away from you.

On the night of the first gale of March you take a torch and a flask out to the breakwater. The lynx does not move. Its eyes catch the light, amber, and hold it. You say the crew's names aloud, Ruaridh, Tam, the boy from Lerwick, and at the last the cat rises, stretches, and picks its way along the rocks towards the hill, glancing back once to be sure you are following.

Below the scree, out of the wind, a dinghy lies on its side with a lamp still wedged in the bow, and beside it three men in orange oilskins, cold and cursing and very much alive. You chalk nothing that night. You sit with them until the lights of the fleet come round the point, and in the morning, for the first time since February, the board reads four.