Flash sheet of twelve loose black ink sketches of cats in sitting, sleeping and stretching poses on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketched cats flash sheet

Black and grey · Flash

A grid of twelve small cat drawings arranged in four rows of three, showing cats sitting, sleeping, curled up and stretching. The linework is loose and sketchy in black ink with some shading on the bellies and stripes, and the cats sit on short ground lines. The image is entirely black and white with no colour and no body part shown.

Cat Sleeping cat Sitting cat Sketch Flash sheet Stripe Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are the only one who still counts the cats in the morning, twelve of them, the way Mr Ashby taught you when the big top still had sawdust and a brass band. Tonight the tent smells of wet canvas and the lion died in March, so the cats have become the act. Tilly, the ringleader, a grey tabby with a torn ear, won't leap through the hoop unless you hold the stool with your left hand, the way your father did.

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The town of Wrexley Common has stopped coming. The posters on the hoarding have faded to the colour of weak tea, and the only children who turn up are the ones sent in out of the rain. You set out the blue cushions anyway. The cats sleep on them between shows, one curled like a comma, one flat on its back with its paws in the air as if the tent were a warm kitchen and nothing had ever been asked of it.

On the last Saturday in October the manager, a man called Pruett with a clipboard and an apology in each pocket, tells you the Hallam brothers have bought the field for housing. You nod. You go back to the wagon and find the cats already packed, sitting in a row on the lid of the trunk as though they had read the notice before you did. Tilly stretches, long and slow, the stripes along her back rippling like a sail going slack.

You load them into the van at dawn. At the field gate you count them once more, twelve, and then you open the back doors and let them go one by one into the wet grass. They do not look back. Tilly is last, and she stops at the hedge to wash a paw, unhurried, as if she has always known where the next warm place would be. You stand there until the grey light takes the last of them, and then you start the engine.