Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a black and grey rocket with a cat silhouette in its porthole, set against an orange sun and clouds on an upper arm.

Rocket with cat silhouette on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A rocket with a black cat silhouette in a cream porthole rises diagonally across the upper arm, with grey shading along its body and black fins. Behind it sits a large flat orange circle, with black and teal clouds drifting across it and grey smoke trailing from the base. The bold, simplified shapes and solid colour fields give the piece a graphic, illustrative look.

Neo-trad Upper arm Rocket Cat Sun Cloud Smoke

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rocket had been Dilys's idea, which was why Ferris agreed to haul the old boiler tank up the towpath at six in the morning, before the lock-keeper was awake to complain. It had once heated the bathwater on the narrowboat *Patience*, and now it wore a nose cone cut from a tin roof and two fins painted the black of old tar. Tabitha, the boat's cat, watched from the cabin roof with the air of someone who had been asked to approve the plans and had not yet decided.

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The porthole came from a ferry sold for scrap at Brentford. Tabitha would not sit still for the stencil, so Dilys cut her silhouette from card, pinned it to the glass, and painted the cream ring around it while the cat sulked in a coil of rope. Ferris rolled a rag in paraffin, wedged it in the tank, and wondered aloud whether the bridge had been built to survive this sort of thing.

They lit it at dusk, when the sun was a flat orange coin sinking behind the gasworks and the clouds lay across it like cut-out paper. The fuse hissed, then sulked, then caught all at once. Grey smoke rolled out low across the water. The rocket did not rise. It lurched sideways, drifted the length of the cut with its fins stirring the reeds, and nudged the lock gate with a dull, polite clonk.

Tabitha stepped out of the porthole, which Ferris had not known she could do, and crossed the wet timber as if she had always meant to. She sat down on the gate and began to wash one paw. Dilys looked at the rocket, then at the cat, then at the smoke thinning over the orange water. "Well," she said, "it went somewhere."