Black line drawing of a cat with closed eyes, curled whiskers and a looping tail, shown as a tattoo flash design inside a border.

Sleeping cat line drawing in a frame

Black and grey · Flash

A single continuous black line forms a cat with closed eyes, pointed ears, curled whiskers and a long tail that loops back into a spiral at the end. The strokes vary in thickness, giving a calligraphic feel against a plain white background. The design sits inside a thin rectangular border, with no shading or colour.

Cat Whiskers Tail Ear

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide came in over the causeway every evening, and every evening Old Maud walked out to the rock to fetch the lamp-oil cans before the water took the path. Her grandson Tam had been left to mind the cottage and the three goats, and he was not minding them. He was asleep under the thorn bush with his cap over his face.

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Maud found the goats wandering up the hill and the cat asleep on the wall above them, a grey thing with a tail as long as a rope, curled over its own back like a question nobody wanted to answer. She did not wake it. Cats on Skerrabost were not to be woken, her own mother had said, because they carried the island's luck in their whiskers and a startled cat could take the luck off with it to the mainland.

She herded the goats down by the shore path, pushing the last one with her knee, and when she came back for the cans the water was already at her ankles. Something brushed her leg. The cat walked beside her through the shallows, not hurrying, its tail lifting and falling like a dropped thread, and it led her back along the stones where the sea had not yet thought to cover them.

Tam found her at the door, soaked to the thigh, the cans in her arms. The cat was sitting on the wall again with its eyes shut. "You let it sleep," he said. "Aye," said Maud. "It did the walking, so I let it sleep."