Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a tabby cat with wide amber eyes, wearing a sailor cap with an anchor and a navy collar with a red neckerchief, on a forearm.

Sailor cat on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A tabby cat with large amber eyes, pink nose and whiskers faces forward, wearing a white sailor cap with an anchor emblem and a navy sailor collar tied with a red neckerchief. The cat is drawn with bold black outlines, soft grey shading in the fur and smooth blended colour, set against a red and yellow backdrop that frames the head. The tattoo fills the upper part of a forearm, photographed straight on against a plain grey background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, you lot, and mind the windfalls, they bruise your ankles worse than any rope. Ask my grandad about Bosun, the tabby that came aboard the Sarah Pell at Avonmouth with a sailor's cap on his head that some drunk had tied on with string. Nobody ever saw him take it off. Not in forty years at sea, and not once when the rain came sideways off the Bay.

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He had eyes like two new pennies, that cat, and he'd fix you with them until you owned up to whatever you'd done with the tar. Sailors don't trust a cat that stares, so the crew called him a Jonah. Then the Sarah Pell ran onto the Scillies in a fog thick as porridge. The mate had gone below to curse the steward, and it was Bosun who sat up on the rail, turned his white collar to the men, and stared at the rocks until somebody finally looked where he was looking. They got the boats over in time.

The ship was lost, mind. Grandad never pretended otherwise. But every man got home, and the cat got a kipper a day for the rest of his life and a little wooden anchor nailed over his bunk. When the owners asked where Bosun had got to, the old steward would just point at the orchard wall behind the chapel, where the cat lies under the Bramleys with his cap still on.

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