Colourful Japanese-style tattoo of a sleeping black and white cat curled around patterned shapes on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeping cat on the top of a foot

Japanese · Other · Mixed · Photo

A sleeping black and white cat with closed eyes and whiskers curls around the top of a foot, with its body wrapping upward. The cat has solid black ink patches and bold outlines, while the background is filled with yellow, red, blue, orange and purple patterned shapes. The tattoo is shown in a close photograph against plain skin.

Japanese Other Cat Sleeping cat Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You learn the cat's name from the lift. Someone has scratched MOTH into the steel panel on the ninth floor, and the cat, which belongs to nobody in particular, has the run of the stairwell. It is black and white, with a face like a folded napkin and a tail that goes up the stairs ahead of you as if it's late for something. In summer it sleeps wherever the sun has been: on the warm lid of the bin store, on the bonnet of the Corsa in the car park, once on the radiator outside flat 14 with its paws tucked under its chin.

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The estate has a mural on the stairwell wall, painted by kids from the youth club two years back: cranes, lanterns, a river of tiles in mustard and teal and a red that has faded to pink. Nobody has ever cleaned the scribble off the bottom step, so the whole block has learned to step over it. You would think the cat would stay on the sunny side of the street. Instead it chooses the landing where the mural is thickest, curls into a pattern of orange lozenges, and sleeps as though the wall had been painted around it.

The autumn the lift breaks for six weeks, you carry shopping up eleven flights and stop on every landing to breathe. Each time, the cat is there first. It opens one eye, decides you are not worth the effort, and closes it again. By the fourth week you are talking to it. You tell it about the letter from the council and the job that might come through in Leeds. It says nothing, which is the most useful thing anybody has said to you all month.

On the last morning the lift works. The cat is gone from the landing, and the mural looks suddenly bare, like a room with the furniture moved out. You press for the ground floor and see it through the gap in the doors, asleep on the step where nobody ever sits, curled tight as a comma, as if it has been waiting for someone to notice that the building still has a little warmth left in it.