Black ink blackwork tattoo of a seated cat filled with mandala patterns on a forearm, with a paper stencil of the same design beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Mandala cat on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A seated cat in profile, with its tail curling down to the lower edge, is outlined in solid black ink. The body is filled with ornamental mandala and paisley-style patterns, including a large flower motif at the centre of the torso. A white paper cut-out of the same design sits to the right of the skin.

Blackwork Forearm Cat Mandala Flower Paisley Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mags Tennant had cut the same cat from the same sheet of card for eleven years, and the stencil was going soft at the ears. She pressed the blade into the curl of the tail, slow, the way her mother had taught her to cut lace at the kitchen table in Kirkcaldy, where the paper was always too thin and the light too grey.

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The cat had come to the shop in a box of tea towels from a house clearance. Nobody claimed it. Mags kept it on the windowsill above the sink, a flat white thing with a flower worked into its belly and paisley ferns climbing its shoulders, and every morning the tabby from next door sat on the wall outside and stared at it through the glass as if it owed him money.

On the Thursday the stencil went missing. She found it in the cat's bowl, folded twice, the tail snipped off clean. Nobody had been in the flat but her and the lad who read the meter, and he swore he'd only touched the cooker.

She sat on the step with the card in her lap and turned it over. Pencilled on the back in her mother's loopy hand were three words, Keep her moving, and under them a flower with eight petals, the same one as on the cat's middle. She had never seen it before. By dusk she had cut a new tail from the offcut, and when she set the card back on the sill the tail was already curling, as if someone had breathed on the paper.