Realistic cat head with blue backdrop on arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A realistic cat head in profile, facing left, rendered in black and grey shading with detailed fur texture and a visible eye. Behind it, a solid blue ink shape fades softly at its lower edge, and part of a dark cross sits at the top of the frame. Colour is mixed, with the blue backdrop contrasting the grey cat.

Realism Upper arm Cat Cross

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You take the back room at Gull's Rest in the last week of October because it is the only one with a view of the harbour wall, and because Mrs Pardoe, the landlady, says the room comes with the cat. The cat is called Admiral. He is grey, heavy in the shoulders, and he sits on the sill of the bay window as though it were a pulpit, facing left, always toward the water.

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Mrs Pardoe does not explain him. She says only that he waited on that sill every evening for eleven years, for her husband's boat, and that the tide tables are pinned by the kettle if you want to know when anything is due in. You learn the tables. The Mary Ellen is due at half four on Thursdays, then on Saturdays, then not at all. Admiral's tail goes still a full minute before any engine can be heard round the wall.

On the first Sunday of November the fog comes in thick enough to swallow the lighthouse. You sit beside him with the lamp off. Beyond the glass the sea is a flat blue-black, and the iron cross on the chapel roof across the lane is only a shadow pressed against the dark. A bell buoy rings somewhere out past the wall. Admiral stands, stretches, and does not leave the sill.

At twenty to five the engine comes. You hear it before you see anything, and then the Mary Ellen noses out of the murk with one lamp lit and a young deckhand standing in the bow, lifting a hand to the window. Admiral makes one low sound in his throat. It is not a greeting. It is the sound of a creature who has finally been told the watch can end. Behind you, Mrs Pardoe comes down the stairs in her slippers, sees the empty sill, and goes to put the kettle on.