Realistic cat in steampunk goggles with gears

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A cat in profile wears steampunk-style goggles with a large round lens and a strap, and is surrounded by interlocking cogs, chains and small buckled fittings. The fur is rendered with soft, layered shading and fine detail on the ears and whiskers, while the gears have sharp highlights and dark recesses. The tattoo is shown in black and grey against pale skin, centred on the limb with a dark background behind.

Realism Other Cat Goggles Gear Cog Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had never once been asked to explain herself, so when the tinker's boy came up the lane with a crate of brass and asked her to hold still, she held still. Her name was Mrs Pennock, though nobody in Harrowby Cross called her that to her face. She sat on the wall outside the mill and watched the water wheel turn slow as a clock, and she thought the boy was a fool for building things that needed winding.

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He built her a pair of goggles anyway. The lens was cut from the bottom of a ship's lantern and the strap was stiff leather that smelled of tallow. Round her neck he fastened chain after chain, linked so tight that when she turned her head the whole harness ticked like a pocket watch. Cogs were bolted to the chain at the places where a collar would go, and the smallest gear sat right above her ear, where it could catch the sun.

For a week the mill folk laughed at her. Then the river flooded the lower road, and the carts stopped, and the only thing that could find the ford in the dark was a cat with a brass eye that threw light sideways across the water. Mrs Pennock walked it three times, goggles down, gears clicking, and each time she stopped on the far bank and looked back, as if to check the boy was still watching.

Nobody ever wound her harness again. It kept running all the same, a little slower each year, and on still evenings you could hear it from the mill wall.