Black and grey fine line tattoo of a curled-up sleeping cat with soft grey shading, on the outer thigh.

Sleeping cat on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A cat curled up asleep, shown in loose black linework with the head tucked toward the lower left and the tail sweeping across the lower right. Soft grey shading fills the body and a faint outline of the curled shape surrounds it. The design is in black and grey only, with the cat centred on a pale, lightly freckled area of skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lamp is low and the wind is still trying the shutters. Nobody in Hollin Reach ever swept the cat off the wall of the old grain tower, and that is how we knew it had been sleeping for three hundred years. Ada Mourne climbed up there the spring the river froze, because the ice had cracked the mill-race and somebody had to find the sluice key, and she found the cat instead, curled on a shelf of drywall with its tail flung out across the dust like a rope someone had let go of.

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She did not wake it. Her grandmother had told her that sleeping things belong to the hour they keep, and an hour is a kind of door. So Ada sat on the stair with her lamp shut and listened to it breathe, and the breathing was slow and even, the way bread sounds when it is rising in a warm room. Below her the river went on cracking itself open. She stayed until the light through the slats turned from grey to gold, and when the cat finally lifted its head and looked at her with that long, unbothered squint, she understood that the sluice key was not the thing she had come for.

We still say a cat in Hollin Reach will tell you when the hard weather is over, by stretching out its tail toward the river. Ada never told anyone what the cat said to her that morning. She only went down the stairs, sat by the mill-race for an hour with her boots in the slush, and found that the water had already begun to move again.

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