Black and grey dotwork big cat head tattooed on the back of a hand, set against a solid black geometric triangle with script lettering beside it.

Roaring big cat on the back of a hand

Blackwork · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A snarling big cat head with bared fangs fills the back of the hand, drawn in bold outlines and fine stippled dotwork shading. A solid black triangle cuts diagonally behind the design, and stylised lettering runs along the side of the hand and fingers. The image is set against a dark leather-look background, with all ink in black and grey.

Blackwork Dotwork Hand Big cat Fangs Lion Tiger Triangle Lettering Script

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pardoe charged Mr Orme an extra shilling a week for the back bedroom, on account of the noise, though nobody had yet heard him make any. He came down to Halsey Sands in October with one suitcase, a tin of pencils and a dog-eared poster for the Carrow Brothers Travelling Menagerie, which he pinned above the scullery sink where the damp had spread in the shape of a map.

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I was fourteen and paid to fetch his coal. He let me watch him draw. Every evening he sat at the kitchen table with the gas turned low and worked on the same cat, a big one with its mouth open so wide the teeth showed, and he went over the fur with a fine point, a dot at a time, until the page looked like frost on a window. He told me her name was Sabine, and that she had once been the finest thing under the Carrow canvas, until the spring she refused the ring and the drum master drove her into the Dutch pens with a poker. He said nothing else about it. He just kept stippling.

On the last night of the month the wind came off the North Sea hard enough to lift the lino. I heard a roar through the floorboards, long and rough, and crept down in my nightgown to find the scullery door open and Mr Orme standing at the sink with his back to me, staring at the black wedge of shadow the moon threw across the wall from the coal chute. Nothing else moved. When he turned and saw me he said the cat had gone quiet at last, and that he would be leaving on the early tram.

In the morning the drawing was gone from the table. In its place lay a folded square of paper with SABINE written across it in capitals, and caught in the wax of the candle beside it, a single orange hair, fine as a thread.