Black and white photo of a script lettering tattoo across a man's chest and an ornamental tattoo on the back of his hand, with a tabby kitten resting against him.

Script chest tattoo and hand tattoo with a kitten

Lettering · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a man in a white vest top, with fine script lettering across his upper chest, partly legible as words including 'But Family'. A tabby kitten rests against his chest while his hand, which carries dark ornamental linework on the back, holds it, and tattooed sleeve work is visible on his left arm. The soft grey tones and close framing centre the tattoos and the kitten against a blurred domestic background.

Lettering Chest Forearm Hand Script Lettering Kitten Cat Ornament Hand

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the kitten at ten past three, in the ambulance bay behind the bins, a tabby no bigger than a glove, mewing at a sealed drain as if it has a complaint to lodge. The night is wet and the bay lights buzz. You kneel on the concrete with the torch in your teeth, a habit Maureen says will get you sacked, and lift it out by the scruff.

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On Ward 7 nobody is pleased. Sister Okafor looks at the kitten over her glasses, then at the clock, then at you. 'Infection control will have my head,' she says, but she does not take it from you. She finds a cardboard sharps box and a folded blanket from the linen trolley, and you line them together in the sluice room while the monitors chirp down the corridor.

All shift the kitten keeps climbing. It goes up your sleeve when you lift Mr Pryce to turn him, and it sits on the handover sheet with one paw on the word 'stable' while Maureen reads out the drug round. At half four, when the windows are grey and the tea trolley has not yet come, it curls into the crook of your elbow and sleeps as though the building were a wardrobe and you were the warm bit at the back.

At handover you write on the back of a discharge leaflet: found one, tabby, no owner, needs a home. Under it, in your worst capitals, you start a second line and cross it out. Sister Okafor reads the leaflet, folds it into her pocket and says, 'Put the box in the locker. Don't let me see it before seven.' The kitten yawns, and it rides home on the 43 bus with its chin on your knuckles.