Fine line tattoo of a sitting cat seen from behind, with its tail curled, on the top of a bare foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sitting cat outline on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small black outline tattoo shows a cat sitting with its back to the viewer and its tail curled round at the base. The linework is thin and even, with no shading, and the ink appears dark grey to black. A grey fluffy cat's fur fills the top right of the frame, and the foot rests on a red blanket with blue nail varnish on the big toe.

Fine line Other Cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The boat is already leaving when you remember the cat, and by then the ferryman has his back to you and the tide is sliding under the hull like a dropped sheet. Mrs Tennant's cat, Sorrel, had come down to the slipway that morning with her tail up, which meant nothing, since Sorrel always carried her tail up. You had assumed she was after the gulls.

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On Skerrow there are eleven houses, one shop that opens when the post boat comes in, and a chapel with no minister. Everyone knows the cats by their habits. Sorrel sat on the harbour wall every evening facing the mainland, her back to the village, her tail wrapped round her feet like a rope coiled on a deck, watching the water as if it owed her money. Nobody ever asked her why. Old Tennant said she was waiting for a ship. Her sister, who had moved to Oban, said she was waiting for nothing and only liked the view.

The crossing takes forty minutes in fair weather. You spend it at the rail, counting the rocks that show their backs, and thinking about how Sorrel never once turned round to see who was leaving. Halfway over, the wind drops and the sea goes flat and grey as a slate roof, and you tell yourself the cat will have gone home by now, that cats always do.

At the mainland pier a grey shape is sitting on the bollard, facing the island, tail curled round its paws. The ferryman laughs and says a fisher's boy brought her across in a creel an hour since, and she climbed out at the first jetty as if she had paid for the fare. You open your mouth to say she isn't yours to keep, then close it, because Sorrel has already decided, the way cats do, that the mainland was where she meant to be all along.