Fine line tattoo of a curled-up sleeping cat on the inner forearm, drawn in single black linework.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeping cat on a forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small outline tattoo shows a cat curled up asleep, with its head tucked toward the body and closed eyes indicated by short lines. The design uses thin, even black linework with no shading or fill. The skin is pale and the plain white background keeps the focus on the small, centred design.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Now listen, because this is the part they always skip when they tell it in the market towns. The cat of Harrowmere Keep was called Ash, and she slept in the one warm place in the whole grey castle, which was the bread oven's cold brother, a niche in the kitchen wall where the flour sacks were stacked. Every morning the baker's boy swore he would move her, and every morning he found her curled there tighter than the day before, as if she had been folded by careful hands and set down to keep.

Keep reading

The winter the river froze to the bottom, the old king sent for every creature in the kingdom that could be sold or eaten. The tax men came with their ledgers and their wagons, and they counted the goats and the hens and the children's pet rabbits. When they reached the kitchen they looked at the cat, and the steward laughed and said a thing that sleeps all day is worth nothing to a king. So they left her, and the boy wept into the flour, and nobody thought to ask Ash what she thought of it.

In spring the steward was found face down in the moat, and the king's ledgers were found soaked and unreadable, and the tax men never came back up the north road. Ash was still curled in her niche, eyes closed, nose tucked toward her own warm belly, and she did not even open them when the boy brought her a fish. Some say that is the whole lesson. I say it is only the cat, asleep, having made her point the only way a cat ever does.

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