Neo-traditional tattoo of a grey cat wearing a black tricorn hat with yellow studs and a skull and crossbones, on the forearm.

Pirate cat in tricorn hat on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A grey cat with green eyes and pink inner ears wears a black tricorn hat edged with yellow dots and marked with a white skull and crossed bones. The linework is bold and black, with soft grey shading on the fur and a lighter wash on the hat. The design fills the frame in two side-by-side views of the same tattoo on a forearm, with a stylised grey wave-like shape beneath the cat.

Neo-trad Forearm Cat Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The flour sacks were still warm from the ovens when I took the hat, which is the only honest reason a cat has for taking anything. It hung on a nail by the back door of Oddie's bakery, black as a coal scuttle, edged in brass studs that caught the lamplight. The skull on the front had faded to the colour of old teeth. Nobody had worn it since the Saucy Mab was broken up at Whitby, and I knew the moment I saw it that it had been waiting for me.

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I sailed nine years under Captain Jessamy Crane, and in all that time I was never trusted with anything heavier than a mouse. Our cook, Huw, baked his bread in a tin hung from the galley beam and sang to the dough so it would rise. Tobias sings to the dough too, though he has the wrong tune. He came down at a quarter past four and found me on the spelt sack in the captain's hat, and he stopped dead with a tray of burnt currant buns in his hands.

I braced for the broom. Instead he looked at me for a long moment, broke the blackest bun in half and set the bigger piece on the flagstones by my paw. "Fair trade," he said.

We have kept to that bargain ever since. I keep the rats out of the flour and he keeps the tricorn on my head while the window goes grey. This morning the sun came up over the breakwater the colour of marmalade. Tobias pulled the first tray from the oven, the smell reached the quay, and I tipped my hat to the water like a captain who had finally found a port that paid in buns.