Pen sketch of a seated cat with a collar and curled tail, with a small outlined heart above its head, shown as a line design.

Seated cat with heart sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A loose ink sketch of a cat sitting upright with its large eyes, whiskers and a collar with a round tag. A curled tail wraps around its feet, and a small outlined heart floats above its head. The bold, confident linework is combined with faint pencil construction lines in the background, and the drawing is in black ink on white paper.

Cat Heart Collar Tail Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now sit closer, you with the wet boots, and mind the tallow drips. This is the tale of the grey cat of Harrow Skerry, who had a collar with a brass tag and no one living who could say who had buckled it on her. The lighthouse keeper's widow, Mrs Ansell, swore the cat came up the tower stairs every evening at the turn of the tide and sat on the third step as if waiting for a bell to ring. Her tail curled round her paws like a question nobody wanted to answer.

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One November the fishing boats stayed in harbour for nine days, and the bread ran short at the Ness. The cat did not go hungry, mind, for she caught herself a gull on the Tuesday and left it on the widow's doorstep with great politeness. That was the first thing folk noticed. The second was the heart. A little hollow heart, drawn in the frost on the lighthouse glass, and nobody could say whose breath had made it.

On the ninth morning the sea went flat as a plate, and a rowing boat came in from the mainland with one man in it, half drowned and asking for a woman called Ansell. He had her husband's ring on a string round his neck. Mrs Ansell looked at the cat, and the cat looked at her, and then the cat did the strangest thing: she walked down the slipway, stepped into the bow of that little boat, and sat down with her tail round her feet as neat as you please.

So that is why, to this day, the Skerry folk never buckle a collar on a cat they do not mean to keep. Now bank that fire and go on home.