Black brush-stroke line drawing of a sitting cat with its tail curled around its feet, shown as a tattoo design on a white background.

Sitting cat line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A seated cat is drawn in a single outline of bold black strokes, showing the head in profile with closed eyes, pointed ears, and a curved tail wrapping around the base. The linework varies in thickness and tapers at the ends, and there is no shading or fill. The subject is centred on a plain white background, with open space around the figure.

Cat Sitting cat Outline Tail Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The stationmaster's cat at Harrow Bridge had sat on the same tin trunk since before the line was double-tracked, and nobody could remember her being hungry or hurried. Her name was Pell, which the porters said was short for something a Welsh signalman had shouted once and then regretted. On the first frost of each winter she would walk the length of the platform, past the coal stack and the lamp room, and sit down in the middle of the down line with her tail wrapped round her feet, until the last goods train of the night slowed to a crawl and blew its whistle at her.

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Nobody ever saw the driver stop. They only saw the train ease off and the cat look up at it, the way a magistrate looks at a man who has wandered into court by mistake. Then she would rise, stretch once from her ears to her tail, and go back to the trunk. The drivers said the wind changed when she got up, and that a bell somewhere down the valley rang once, though the church at Harrow had been pulled down in the war.

In the spring a girl called Ada Quarles came to work the ticket window, and she thought the whole business was nonsense until the night the goods train came in with its brakes gone soft. Ada ran out with a lantern. The cat was already sitting on the rails, eyes closed, ears pricked at the dark. Ada did not wait to be told. She stood beside the cat and lifted the lantern high, and the driver, seeing two shapes and a light where no platform should be, found his nerve and his brakes together.

The train stopped with its buffers touching Ada's boots. Pell opened one eye, looked at her as if she had finally got something right, and walked back to the trunk. Ada kept the post for forty years and never once sat on the line, though she always said she could have.