Colour tattoo of a pink cat sitting in outline on the side ribs, set against a blue, green and yellow watercolour-style splash.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Pink cat with watercolour splash on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A thin black outline frames a pink cat seated in profile with its tail curling up behind it. The cat is filled with soft pink and red tones, and it sits on a loose background of blue, green and yellow splashes that fade out at the edges. The tattoo is shown on the side of the torso, with the subject cropped to the ribs area and a rainbow-dyed garment at the lower edge of the frame.

Ribs Cat Watercolour Splash Silhouette Outline

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are fourteen in the Halden Reach, old enough to be sent up the kiln tower to scrape pigment from the dead furnaces, young enough that nobody checks your gloves. The old world's colours survive only as dust in the cracks: a rust-pink from baked clay, a blue your mother swears came from a stone no longer dug, and a green from something that once grew in ponds before the water turned to salt. You carry them down in tin pots, and the ledger keeper weighs every grain.

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On the third day, out past the vents where the ground dips toward the old school, you find a cat. Not a living one, since the cats went with the seed vaults, but a glazed tile set into a broken wall. Someone long ago painted a seated animal in profile, its tail curled up behind it, then flung a ring of blue and green around the outline as though the colour had splashed and decided to stay. You trace the edge with a fingertip. The pink has held through all the grey centuries, faded to the colour of a healed scratch, and the wall around it is nothing but cinders.

You pry it loose with the scraper, wrap it in your spare shirt, and smuggle it home under your coat while the lamps are still dimmed. The ledger keeper finds it anyway, turns it over in his hands, and asks what it is worth. You say nothing. That night you prop it on the sill where the cracked window lets in the first grey light, and the splashes catch it so that the cat seems to glow from inside, as if it has been sitting there all along, waiting for someone to come home and notice.

Tomorrow you will climb the tower again and weigh your pigment with the others. But you will look harder at the walls on the way.