Black line drawing of a standing cat with its tail raised, filled with swirls and dots in a blackwork style on a cream background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental cat design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A standing cat with a long curled tail is shown in profile, with its outline and body filled with ornamental swirls and small dots. The linework is solid black and bold, with the filigree pattern concentrated in the body, legs and tail. The design is drawn in black on a plain cream background with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Dotwork Cat Swirl Dot Tail Filigree

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning that October the gravel was raked again, but not in the straight lines my father taught me. The paths came out in curls, tight swirls that spilled into the borders and stopped just short of the foxgloves, as if whoever did it had been careful not to bruise anything. I blamed the lads from the lodge. Mrs Pargeter swore it was the ginger tom with the notched ear, who sat on the potting shed roof like a weathervane and never once looked sorry.

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So I set a flask by the gate and sat up in the cold. Near two o'clock the tom dropped off the wall, stopped by the rake and considered me with a kind of patience. Then he began to walk. Wherever his paws touched, the gravel took a loop, and where his tail swung it drew a long question mark through the beds. He went round the sundial twice and up the old apple walk, and I followed with the lantern, slowly understanding that the pattern was the one my mother had stitched in black thread on the linen sampler in the hall.

At the far wall the walk ended at a little iron gate nobody had opened since she died. The cat sat down in front of it, tail curled round his feet, and waited. I had kept the key on a nail in the shed for thirty years and never once used it. The hinges complained like a choir clearing its throat. Beyond lay a bed of lilies gone wild, and at its heart the gravel had been raked into one last spiral, with a single dot at the centre where a flat stone had been moved aside.

Under the stone was a biscuit tin. Inside, folded small, was a note in her looping hand: Let him finish. Then go to bed. The cat rose, shook the dew from his tail and walked back up the path, leaving the gravel smooth behind him. I did as I was told.