Full back tattoo in colour realism showing a grinning teal cat, a tall skeletal figure beside a stitched rag-doll figure, a pink moon, bats and a bare tree, placed across the lower back.

Moonlit skeleton couple and grinning cat on back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A large tattoo covers the lower back with a night scene: a tall skeletal figure and a stitched rag-doll figure stand on a dark spiral hill beneath a pale pink moon. A grinning teal striped cat sits in the lower left foreground, with a bare tree and a flock of bats on the left. The shading is soft and painterly, with blue and teal clouds blending into the background and the cat's fur rendered in fine striped detail.

Realism Back Cat Moon Bat Bare tree Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had already been asked to carry the ring twice, and twice it had grinned and let the thing drop into the mud of the lower field, so when the tall, bone-thin man came up the spiral path on the night of the wedding he bent down and asked it a third time, very politely, as though the cat were a bishop.

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"You will walk in front of us," he said. "You will keep your eyes on the moon and your mouth shut."

The cat's mouth did not shut. It never did. It sat on the crooked tail of the hill and pointed its whiskers at the bare tree, where the bats hung in black clusters like a row of folded umbrellas, and it said that a bride stitched from her mother's rag bag could not be married on a hill with no proper path to it, and that the path was the cat's business and nobody else's.

So they walked, the man folding his long legs under him, the stitched woman with her seams showing at the wrist, and the cat ahead, teal and striped, lighting the way with its green eyes. The moon hung over them the colour of a peeled peach. Halfway up, the woman stopped and asked whether the ring was truly lost, and the cat looked at her with great patience and opened its jaws, and there it was, bright on the grass where it had been all along.

Afterwards people in the valley said the moon had never looked so pleased with itself, and the cat, asleep on the spiral with its tail over its nose, did not argue.