Black and grey sketchy tattoo of a thin, wide-eyed cat with a long tail, on the lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sketchy cat with pale eyes on a lower leg

Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A tall, thin cat sits in profile with its head turned, showing large pale eyes with white highlights and pointed ears. The linework is loose and scratchy, with grey shading across the body and a dark, heavily inked tail that curls up the right edge. The image is cropped close around the leg, with the cat set against plain skin.

Calf Cat Tail Ear Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came in through the fire door during the quickstep, and nobody but me noticed, because I was the only one who had been watching that door since the band started. Thin as a coat hanger and twice as attentive, she picked her way between the couples' shoes and sat down under the piano as if she had booked the table.

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Mr Halloran, who ran the Palais Royale with a ledger and a cough, wanted her out. He came at me with a broom before the second number. I told him she was on the books now. He asked which books. I said the ones with the stains on the back page, where I kept the names of everything that came in off the street and didn't leave. He didn't like that answer, but he liked the broom less when she turned her head and looked at him with those pale eyes, lamp-bright, as if someone had left two bulbs burning in the dark behind her face.

She stayed all winter. She sat at the edge of the floor while the hems of silver dresses swept past her, and she never once got trodden on. Her tail curled up the wall behind the bandstand like a question that had decided against asking. On the last night before the hall closed, the lights dropped for the final waltz, and when they came back up she was gone, and so was the back page of the ledger.

I still hear the piano sometimes, and I still check the fire door. Halloran says I've gone soft. He may be right, but I know where the cat went, and I haven't told him.