Neo-traditional tattoo of a woman with dark curled hair and a jewelled headpiece, with a cat below her, on the outer thigh, next to a fox and a squirrel on the other leg.

Neo-trad woman and cat portrait on thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A large neo-traditional portrait of a woman with dark curled hair, pearl strands and a jewelled headpiece runs down the outer thigh, with a tabby cat with green eyes beneath her. The linework is bold and black, with smooth shading on the skin tones and rich colour in the cat, the headpiece and the green and red accents. Other tattoos of a fox, a squirrel and a bee are partly visible on the adjacent leg, and a white garment and dark shorts frame the top of the image.

Neo-trad Thigh Woman Portrait Cat Hair Pearl Headpiece Fox Squirrel Bee

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had already settled on the ledger when Mrs Ada Pell came in with the pearls wrapped in a handkerchief. Mr Greaves, behind the counter, pretended not to notice that the animal sat on the very page where the last three pledges were written. Tabby, Ada called her, though the name was a kindness. The cat had come in off the Scarborough sea wall in March and never gone back out.

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The necklace was four rows, each pearl the size of a pea, with a headpiece of jet and green glass that Ada had worn to every Whitsun dance since 1911. She laid them on the baize. Greaves turned each pearl under the lamp, counting under his breath, while the cat watched his fingers the way a magistrate watches a witness. 'Seven pounds,' he said. 'Eight, if the clasp is original.' Ada said the clasp was the only original thing left about her, and the cat blinked as if it agreed.

She came back in October, when the herring boats were tied up for the winter, and redeemed everything but the headpiece. Greaves asked why. She tapped the glass on the counter and said she had grown used to its weight, the way a mare comes to a particular bridle. He did not ask what she meant. He had kept the shop long enough to know that some pledges are not about money.

The last time she came in, the cat was gone and so was the headpiece. In its place on the baize lay one pearl, warm from a pocket, and a pawn ticket in Ada's hand for a sum nobody had ever written down. Greaves tucked that ticket into the ledger, between the pages where the cat had slept, and he never once tried to redeem it.