Colour tattoo of a sitting cat outline filled with a red rose and green leaves, placed on the forearm.

Rose inside a cat silhouette on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cat in profile, drawn with a bold black outline, has its body filled with a red rose in full bloom and green leaves. The cat's tail curls down the lower edge, and the unfilled areas of the silhouette are left as bare skin. Solid flat colour dominates, with red and green shading inside the rose petals, and the tattoo is centred on the forearm against a plain background.

Traditional Forearm Cat Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lead came back from the foundry with the wrong bend in it, and Mrs Hale was on the step at eight wanting her window by Friday. It was her husband's cat she wanted, Pilot, who had sat on the sill every afternoon for nineteen years watching the rain come up the valley. She didn't want a picture of a cat. She wanted the cat to be the window itself, with a rose sitting inside it like something kept.

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So I cut the cat in clear glass, because the body had to let the light through, and I cut the rose in flashed red with the petals layered so they'd throw colour when the sun came round. The leaves went in green on either side of the head. The hardest part was the back edge. The rose wanted to keep going past the spine, and every time I fitted a petal to the silhouette I had to shorten it, until the bloom sat tight and a little crowded, the way a cat curls round something it won't give back.

Old Mr Pryce from next door leaned on the fence and said roses don't fit in cats. I told him a cat fits anything it likes. He went off muttering about lead lines and I went back to the bench. The tail I left as a single run of lead with no glass in it at all, one long curve down the bottom of the frame, because Mrs Hale said Pilot had never once in his life walked in a straight line.

She came for the window on Friday and set it in the sash herself. When the afternoon sun came round it threw a red bloom across the wallpaper, and the cat's shadow stood up in the middle of it, tail curled. Under the sill there was still a folded blanket with a dent in it, and the red light lay across the dent like it had been waiting for it.