Colour Japanese style tattoo of a sleeping cat with a red peony and green leaves across the top of a foot.

Sleeping cat and peony on the foot

Japanese · Other · Colour · Photo

A sleeping cat with closed eyes and a small pink nose sits below a large red peony, with its tail curling up and over the flower to end in a pink bud. Bold black outlines define the cat, and its black patches are shaded in grey, while the peony petals are layered with lighter and darker red. Green and teal leaves frame the flower, and the design fills the top of the foot against a dark background.

Japanese Other Cat Peony Flower Leaves Tail Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat slept on the cabin roof through every lock on the Leeds and Liverpool, and nobody on the Brightwater ever woke her, because waking her meant the peony in the tin pot would close its petals and go back to being a bud. That was the arrangement Ada Crane had made with the cat's mother, or so Ada said, and she was not a woman who told tales to children.

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Ada had brought the pot aboard the year her husband Tom went into the water at Burnley. It was a dented biscuit tin with a peony root in it, red as a coal. Tom always said a barge needed one thing that did nothing useful. The cat came in the spring, thin and black and white, and she took the sun beside the pot as if she had paid for the spot.

The years went by and the boat carried coal, then bricks, then nothing at all. Ada noticed that whenever a boy from the towpath reached for the cat, the flower dropped its head and the leaves went grey at their edges. So the boys learned to sit quiet on the bank. The tail would lift at its tip, curl over the blooms, and settle again, and the bud at its end would blush pink as if it were listening.

The last summer, Ada tied the Brightwater up at Wigan for good and sat on the step with a cup going cold. The cat stretched, yawned, and climbed down into her lap. The peony opened one more petal, slow as a sigh, and Ada understood that it had only ever been keeping time for the sleeper.