Black and white flash design of a seated cat covered in swirling, tribal-style linework, with curled whiskers and a curled tail.

Seated cat with swirling tribal linework

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised cat sits upright in solid black silhouette, with its body, face and tail filled with white curling swirls and spirals. The whiskers extend outward in looping curls, and the paws are finished with rounded, scroll-like toe shapes. The design is shown in pure black and white on a plain background, with no shading or colour.

Traditional Cat Swirl Whiskers Tail Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been coming off the Corn Exchange roof since seven, and by ten the gutter above Stall Nine was spilling like a broken bead curtain. Mum said I'd never sell a single brass hinge in weather like this, so I sold nothing and watched the cat instead. It sat on a stack of unsold oilcloth all morning, upright as a bookend, its tail curled round its feet like a question nobody wanted answered.

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Nobody owned it. Stall Six swore it had come up from the river with the barges, and that it once walked straight through the fish market without a single gull daring to touch it. Its whiskers went out in long looping curls on either side of its face, and when the wind got under the tarpaulin they lifted and settled as if they were keeping time with the drips.

At half eleven a man in a yellow sou'wester bought a clock with a cracked face and paid in coins he counted twice. When he'd gone, I found the coins had been swapped for buttons, all black and polished, laid out on my folding table in a neat spiral. The cat had moved to the table's edge without my seeing. It gave me the look a schoolteacher gives a pupil who has finally got the sum right.

I packed up at four. The cat was still there, rain running off its ears in silver threads, so I left it the clock's cracked lid as a saucer. Mum asked later what I'd sold. I told her a spiral of buttons and one very patient cat, and she said that was a fair day's trade for a wet Saturday.