Six continuous fine-line drawings of seated and stretching cats in pale gold on a dark brown background, shown as a tattoo flash design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Six line-drawn cats on a flash sheet

Fine line · Colour · Flash

The sheet shows six cat designs drawn in single, unbroken lines of pale gold on a dark brown background. The poses vary, with some cats sitting upright, stretching, curling and looking to the side, and the lines swell and thin along their bodies and tails. The even spacing in a grid makes it read as a flash sheet of separate designs.

Fine line Cat Line art Animal Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mairi Blackett kept the light on Scarra Rock for thirty-one years, and in all that time the cats never once came up the stairs together. They came one at a time, the way weather arrives, and each one sat on a different step as if the tower had been built around it.

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The first was a black tom off a Stromness fishing boat, thin as a mooring rope. He settled on the landing and watched the lamp turn. The second arrived in a crate of paraffin and would not be put out. By the time the sixth had come up the cliff path, Mairi had stopped calling them strays and started calling them the crew.

The winter the Maren went down, the sea came over the gallery rail and the wick guttered to nothing. Mairi climbed with the tinderbox in her teeth and found the six of them already waiting, lined along the iron rail with their tails curled round their feet, every face turned towards the dark glass. She could not see a thing in that black, but she lit the lamp by the pale glow of their eyes and turned the mechanism by hand until dawn.

When the lifeboat came round the point in the grey morning, the men aboard saw one lit window high on the rock and six small shapes on the gallery, unmoving. Mairi never told the mainland that the cats kept watch in shifts, and the cats never told anyone anything at all.