Black and grey cat tattoo wearing a collar on a person's ribs, next to a blackwork tribal band on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Seated cat on ribs with tribal forearm band

Realism · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A large seated cat in profile with a decorated collar covers the side of the torso, with the tail curving along the lower ribs. The cat is shaded in smooth black and grey with soft gradients and fine highlights, while a separate tribal band of solid black triangles and linework wraps the forearm. The photograph is taken at an angle in an indoor kitchen setting, with the tattoos as the main focus.

Realism Blackwork Ribs Forearm Cat Collar Triangle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Nell, the basalt cat came out of its crate on Tuesday with straw still in its ears, and Mr Haddow made me hold the torch while the crane lowered her onto the plinth. She is smaller than the photographs suggest, no taller than a milk bottle, but she sits the way a woman sits when she has been kept waiting and intends to say so. Her collar is cut in five rows of little beads, and someone in Thebes spent a winter on each one.

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The museum wants a line drawing for the autumn catalogue, and the trouble is the shading. Everything on her is black and grey, the fur gone smooth as wet slate, and the only highlight is where a thumb has rubbed the stone for three thousand years. I tried pencil, then charcoal, and last night I gave up and simply traced her outline on the back of the crate invoice. Mr Haddow found me at it at midnight and said the cat had been waiting longer than the invoice had.

This morning the sun came through the high windows and laid a stripe of light across her haunches, and I saw what I had been missing. The tail does not hang. It curls round the base of the plinth exactly as a cat's tail curls round a sleeping foot, and the curve follows an old scratch where somebody's trowel slipped at Bubastis in 1887. I have drawn it now, scratch and all, and I am going to ink it tomorrow in the kind of black that does not lift off the page.

Come up on the Saturday train if you can. I want you to see her before the glass goes on, and I want you to tell me I am not mad to think she is pleased with the drawing.