Colour tattoo of a sleeping white cat curled on a stack of three orange books, with a pink and purple splash behind, on the thigh.

Sleeping cat on a stack of books on the thigh

Thigh · Colour · Photo

A white cat with black outlines lies curled up with its eyes closed on top of a stack of three orange books. Behind the cat is a loose pink and purple watercolour-style splash that fades into the skin. The black linework is simple and clean, and the composition is centred on the thigh.

Thigh Cat Sleeping cat Book Splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Orla Quennell had kept the returns shelf at Marrow Lane library for thirty-one years, and in all that time nobody had ever moved the cat off the top of it. The children called him Biscuit and the older members called him Inspector, after a detective novel nobody could remember finishing. He slept on the three fat volumes of the parish register because they were the warmest thing in the building.

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In October the council announced the library would close on Friday. Boxes arrived. Orla packed the shelves into crates, labelled each one in capitals, and kept stepping over the cat, who did not move for anyone. On Thursday evening the sun came low through the west window and lit the dust in the air a raw pink, the colour of the old posters on the wall, and the cat stretched, opened one eye, and went back to sleep.

Orla sat on the step and watched the light fade. A boy from the estate who had come in every Saturday for six years knocked on the glass with a library card he no longer needed. She let him in. He asked where Biscuit would go, and she said she didn't know, and the two of them stood there listening to the cat breathe.

Nobody had to decide in the end. On Friday morning the register was still on the shelf, but the cat was gone from it, and pressed flat under the spine of the top book was a single card in Orla's careful hand: Borrowed by: the cat. Due back: whenever he likes.