Black and grey tattoo of a panther and a spotted leopard split down the middle inside a circle, placed on a thigh.

Panther and leopard split face on thigh

Realism · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A split animal portrait shows a black panther on the left and a spotted leopard on the right, both with yellow eyes. The panther side uses smooth realistic shading, while the leopard side is built from dark spots and stippled dots. A thin geometric triangle mesh frames the left half of the circle, and dotwork fills the right half.

Realism Geometric Dotwork Thigh Panther Leopard Big cat Portrait Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The men from the travelling show left the two cats at Hollin Farm in November, when the money ran out and the lorry would not start. You were nineteen and the only one willing to carry a bucket into the stable. The black one came to the bars first, slow and certain, while the spotted one stayed at the back under the straw, pretending not to feel the cold.

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Your uncle called them Day and Night, which was no help, because the spotted one looked more like a moth-eaten shadow than anything bright. Every morning you broke the ice on the water trough and counted the frost on the chicken wire that ran down the middle of the barn. At dusk they lay on either side of it with their faces pressed to the same diamonds of galvanised mesh, their eyes lit yellow by the paraffin lamp you hung between them.

In the third week of February the thaw came early and then the frost came back hard. In the morning the wire had sprung a corner where the post had rotted through. You found the black cat sitting in the gap, and the spotted one already beside her in the straw, neither of them trying to get out. They were not fighting. They were simply close, the way two halves of a split coin sit together on a cold table when someone has finally pushed them side by side.

You did not mend the fence that day. You fetched a second lamp, sat on an upturned crate, and let them be until the light went grey over the top field and the first blackbird started up. Your uncle asked later why the wire had stayed broken, and you told him the truth, which was that nothing in that barn had ever looked so whole.