Six black line-art cats on a cream background, shown sitting, walking and stretching, drawn as a fine line tattoo flash sheet with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six line-drawn cats in varied poses

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A flash sheet of six stylised cats drawn in black linework on a pale cream background. The cats sit, walk and stretch in different poses, with tails curling and bodies outlined in flowing strokes that vary in thickness. The design is flat black ink with no shading or colour, and the six figures are spaced evenly across the sheet.

Fine line Cat Line art Silhouette Sitting cat Tail Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and stop pulling at the bread. Yes, you there with the crust. Brother Anselm kept six cats in the scriptorium at Saint Oswin's, and not one of them ever wrote a word, though every one of them behaved as if the ink had been mixed for them alone.

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The first was grey and sat on the lectern like a bishop on a throne, tail wrapped round his feet as if the Psalms were his private property. The second was a fat tabby who lay on the cold stove and would not be moved by prayer nor by the abbot. The third stretched along the windowsill every morning, long as a bell rope, arching her back to catch the sun through the old glass. Anselm said she was the only one who understood the Office of Lauds.

The fourth walked the length of the cloister with her tail held high like a question mark, stopping at every doorway to decide whether the monks were worth the trouble. The fifth slunk low beneath the tables, tail sweeping after her like a dropped scarf, and the novices swore she carried messages to the rats for a penny of cheese. The sixth, the little black one, sat with his back to everyone and never once looked at the page.

One winter the abbot came to count the candles and found the ink pots knocked over, the vellum smeared with paw prints, and all six cats curled upon the Gospel of John. He raised his stick to them. Anselm only smiled and said, 'They are finishing the illumination, Father. Look at the tails.' The abbot looked, and saw that the loops and curls on the page were the very shapes of the cats' tails, and he laughed until he had to sit down.