A red linework outline of a curled-up sleeping cat tattooed on skin, with closed eyes and a long tail wrapped around its body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeping cat outline in red ink

Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cat curled up asleep, drawn as a single continuous red outline with a few short interior strokes for the closed eyes, ears and whiskers. The linework is even and slightly raised, and the line weight is consistent around the head, paws and tail. The ink is one flat red throughout, with no shading, and the design fills the centre of the frame against plain skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Maud had been sent up to Harlow Keep in October to count the roof slates for the new owner, and she found the cat on the third landing, asleep in a patch of weak sun that came through a window with no glass. It was grey, or had been once. The damp had turned its fur the colour of the stones around it. Nobody knew whose it was. The kitchen boy at the inn swore it had lived there since the siege, and the carter swore it was a ghost. Maud only wanted the slates counted before the rain came in.

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She had a pot of red ochre in her coat, the kind the masons used to chalk the lines they meant to cut. Her father had taught her that a line drawn in one go never wanders, so long as the hand does not lift. On the wall beside the sleeping cat she began at the nape of its neck and let the ochre run around the curve of the skull, down the back, round the tail where it lay tucked under the body, and up again to the ears. The cat did not stir. She drew the closed eyes as two short strokes and the whiskers as three on each side, and then she stopped, because the tail had come round to meet the start and there was nowhere else to go.

When she climbed down that evening the slates were counted and forty-one short of what the deed promised. The new owner laughed and said the cat had been carrying them off for its bed. Maud went back up in the morning with a heel of bread. The red outline was still on the wall, bright as the day she made it, but the cat was gone. In the sun patch where it had slept lay a single slate, new and unmarked, still warm to the touch.

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