Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Single-line cat head on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A single continuous black line forms the profile of a cat's head, with upright ears, a closed eye, a small nose and whiskers extending from the muzzle. The line work is thin and even, with no shading, and the design sits on smooth skin against a pale, softly lit background. The composition is centred and simple, with the tattoo filling most of the frame.

Fine line Forearm Cat Cat head Whiskers Line art Profile

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came up the harbour steps at low water as though someone had sent for it. Ivy Trethewey was mending a crab pot on the slipway when it sat down beside her bucket, ears pricked, and watched the boats with the patience of a creature who had already chosen which one was his. Nobody on Quay Street claimed it. The gulls didn't claim it either, and that was the first thing the men at the net loft remarked on.

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That evening she sat by the stove with a pencil and the back of last month's tide table and tried to draw the cat without lifting the point. The chin wanted to run into the ear, and the whiskers wanted a second line of their own. In the end she let the pencil wander where it liked, round the brow, down the nose, under the chin and off the edge of the paper, and it came out whole. Owen, home from Plymouth for the summer, said it looked like a rabbit that had received bad news. She pinned it above the range anyway.

The cat was gone by August. Ivy found the tide table curled on the flagstones one morning, soft with damp, and a single grey hair caught in the pencil at the chin. Owen wanted to bin it. She smoothed it flat and put it in the dresser drawer with the string and the spare hooks.

Two winters later the Lowena went out on a grey Thursday with a new skipper and a crew who had never heard of Ivy's drawing. Off the breakwater a long dark wake spread behind the boat, unbroken from the harbour mouth as far as anyone could see. The skipper swore afterwards that a grey cat had slept on the bow the whole way out, and nobody on the quay was surprised to hear it.