Black line drawing of a sleeping cat with closed eyes, whiskers and its tail curled around its body, shown as a tattoo design on white.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeping cat with curled tail line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A simple black line drawing shows a cat asleep, with closed eyes drawn as short curved strokes and its head resting on rounded paws. Its long tail curls around the body and ends in a tight spiral, and long whiskers extend to the left. The bold, uneven outlines are drawn on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Cat Sleeping cat Tail Whiskers Spiral Paw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Brother Anselm had been trying for three days to finish the tail of the S on folio forty, and each time his pen reached the curl it wobbled and dragged the ink into a blot. The scriptorium at Saint Ebba's was cold in January, and the only warm thing in it was the cat, who had claimed the sill above the hot flue as soon as the steward left the room.

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Anselm had never named her. The novices called her Vespers because she appeared at dusk and vanished at prime, and because she made the same small noise every evening, a sigh pitched somewhere between a hinge and a question. Tonight she lay with her forepaws tucked beneath her chin, eyes shut to thin dark slits, her long grey tail wound around her body and ending in a tight, deliberate spiral like the last flourish of a capital letter.

He looked from the cat to the page and back again. The letter he had been asked to decorate was a Q, for quies, rest, and the scribe who had written the psalter before him had drawn its tail as one long unbroken loop. Anselm had been trying to make it grander. He dipped his pen, hesitated, and instead of finishing the flourish he simply let the line run where the cat's tail ran, round and round, and stopped it at the centre without ornament.

In the morning the abbot found the page, frowned at the blot, then paused over the Q and turned the leaf without a word. The cat had gone back to the flue by then. Anselm left the spiral exactly as it was.