Three-panel drawing of a black ink design of a cat curled up with a tiger's head, shown being brushed in progressively in a Japanese-influenced style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeping cat and tiger design in ink

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

The image is a three-panel sequence showing a hand using a brush to build up an ink drawing. The finished design shows a sleeping cat with a white face and black markings on its head, merged with a tiger's fierce face and striped body curled into an oval shape. The linework is bold and calligraphic, with grey wash shading on the tiger's stripes and a plain white paper background.

Japanese Tiger Cat Sleeping cat Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed Hollin Pass by noon, and by dusk nobody at the inn was pretending the carrier would come back for you. Mrs Aske set down a bowl of barley broth, then shoved the grey cat off the settle with her elbow. It hit the flagstones without a sound, sat up, and studied you with its ears laid flat, the way a magistrate studies a man who has walked in without a hat.

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Above the hearth hung a sheet of paper pinned at each corner, its edges gone the colour of weak tea. A tiger curled in an oval, its face fierce and its stripes laid on in bold black strokes, and at its head a cat lay asleep, the two shapes so tangled you could not say where one stopped. 'A sign-writer drew it to pay off a winter's tab,' Mrs Aske said. 'He said the cat was the tiger's dream, and the tiger had to keep dreaming it or it would wake hungry.'

You laughed, and she did not. That night the wind worked at the shutters and the fire sank to a red eye. You woke once with the cat on your chest, heavy as a sack of meal, its purr rattling in your ribs. You lay still rather than disturb such a determined sleeper.

At first light the plough came grinding up the pass. You shouldered your bag and looked back from the gate. The cat sat in the doorway with its tail wrapped round its paws, and behind it the old paper had been turned face to the plaster, so that only a dark oval showed through, like something still asleep.