Two black and grey Japanese style tattoos on the top of a pair of feet, one showing a rat and the other a cat and snake, both set among clouds.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Rat and cat with snake on feet in Japanese style

Japanese · Other · Black and grey · Photo

Two tattoos on the tops of a pair of feet show a black rat curled around a white form on the left and a black and white cat resting on a snake on the right. Both designs use bold black outlines, solid black areas and grey shading for the clouds and the snake's scales. The compositions are mirrored across the two feet and sit within rounded, yin yang style shapes.

Japanese Other Cat Snake Cloud Yin yang

Find an artist for this

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 hear the rats before the cage cools. They come up the old airshaft at Hollin Pit every night the lamp man forgets to shut the gate, and by the time you reach the coal store with your bucket they have already stripped the bread from the yard shelves. Mrs Teale says it is the mine's doing, that the rock underneath has been opened up too far and the vermin have nowhere else to go. You do not argue. You have a sack of kindling and a cat called Marrow who has not missed a night since the pit was sunk.

Keep reading

Marrow is no beauty. White except for a black cap over one ear, a tail with a kink in it, and a habit of sleeping on whatever is warmest, which this winter means the dead snake of a fuse cable coiled behind the boiler. The men say she is possessed. You say she is just lazy and clever in equal measure. On the night the gate is left open again you find her not sleeping at all but crouched on the coal heap, staring down into the black gap where the old tunnel breathes.

Something long and slow comes up out of it. Then a rat, big as a loaf, sleek and deliberate, and behind it the grey smoke of the air, curling round the coal like cloud. Marrow does not spring. She waits until the rat is clear of the shaft, then sets one paw on its neck the way you would hold a lid down on a pan.

By morning the yard is quiet. Marrow sleeps curled on the fuse cable with her head tucked into the coil, the rat is nowhere, and when you look for it later you find only a thin dark line running back into the earth, as if something has finally agreed to go home.