Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a sleeping black and white cat wrapped in pink peonies and green leaves on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sleeping cat with peonies on an upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A black and white cat with closed eyes curls up inside a rounded outline, with pink peony blooms and green leaves framing it. The linework is bold and black, with soft grey shading on the cat's dark fur and cloud-like black shapes behind the flowers. Pink and green ink dominates the composition, with the cat's pale face and the black markings providing contrast.

Japanese Botanical Upper arm Cat Sleeping cat Peony Flower Leaves Cloud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came up from the coal road the spring the Hargreaves pit flooded, a black and white thing with a torn ear, and it walked straight past the men with their lamps to the back wall of Widow Tolley's yard. Nobody owned it. It slept where it liked, and it liked the peonies.

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Widow Tolley had planted them from a bulb her husband brought home from a sailor who swore they came from over the water, where the people painted clouds on their doors. She said the flowers were too heavy for a yard full of smoke, and they bloomed anyway, red as a fresh cut, and the leaves stayed green when everything else on the row went grey. The cat slept in the middle of them with its paws tucked under, its eyes shut, and the miners' wives said it was listening.

When the cage stuck at the bottom of the shaft one February, with eleven men below and the rescue crew arguing over ropes, the cat got up, stretched, and walked to the pit gate. It sat down there and did not move. Tolley's grandson, who was nine and had nothing to do, followed it and sat beside it, and after a while the men with the picks swore they heard tapping from the east drift and went that way instead of the way the foreman wanted.

Eleven came up by dawn. The cat was back in the yard by then, and when Tolley went out she found it curled in the peonies with its eyes closed and a little drift of petals on its back. She never moved it. The colliery men took their caps off when they passed the wall, and nobody in the row asked the cat for anything again, which was how it liked things.