Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a sleeping cat with a red peony on its back and green leaves, placed on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeping cat and peony on a foot

Japanese · Other · Mixed · Photo

A sleeping cat with closed eyes and a white and black patterned coat curls beneath a large red peony, with its tail rising up and around the flower. Green leaves frame the peony, and the cat's outlines and fur markings are in solid black with smooth shading. Bold colour fills the flower and leaves against the pale skin and dark leather background.

Japanese Neo-trad Other Cat Peony Flower Leaves Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hesketh kept nine rooms above the harbour at Saltmarrow, and the cat that came with the house slept wherever the sun was warmest. In April that was the flagstones by the back step, beneath the peony her husband had planted the year he drowned. Nobody had ever seen it flower. It stood there for eleven summers, green and sulky, while the lodgers complained about the gulls.

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The new man arrived in May with a tin trunk and a fishing permit he never used. He was a clerk from Leeds called Garside, and he disliked the cat from the first morning. He moved it off the step with his boot. He shut it out of the scullery. Each time, the cat went back to the same flagstones and lay down with its eyes shut, as if the matter had been settled somewhere else.

On the first warm night of June, Mrs Hesketh found Garside on his knees in the yard with a lamp, not swearing, only staring. The peony had opened in the dark, a red head bigger than a dinner plate, and the cat lay curled beneath it with its tail wound up the stem and round the bloom like a ribbon. The leaves had come out green along the wall. Garside asked her, quite quietly, whether she had known. She said she had always known the cat was sensible.

He left on the Monday. The cat stayed on the step. The petals dropped by the end of the month and nobody swept them up, and when Mrs Hesketh went out in the morning the cat was asleep on them, eyes closed, unbothered by anything the sea had to say.