Small black and grey cat tattoo with stippled shading on the ankle, shown in a black and white close-up with a trouser cuff above it.

Small cat on an ankle

Dotwork · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small cat with pointed ears, whiskers and a stylised body sits on the inside of the ankle. The outlines are fine and the fur is built up with dense dots and light stippling in black ink. The photograph is a close, black and white view with a trouser cuff across the top and a hand at the right edge.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have worked the lost property hatch at Calder Bridge for eleven years, and in all that time the only thing never claimed is the cat. Nobody owns her. She arrives with the first milk float's clatter, slips under the hatch, and settles on the shelf between a child's wellington and a box of unlabelled keys, as if she were the one doing the inventory.

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On Tuesday a man in a grey overcoat asks for a brass pocket watch, the kind with a cat scratched into the lid. You check the ledger. Nothing. He describes the cat, ears like folded envelopes and a tail that curls like a question mark, and you look at the shelf. She is looking back at you with the expression of someone who has heard a secret and means to keep it.

You find the watch in her basket, wedged under a tartan blanket. The lid is scratched and the engraving has worn down to a scatter of dots, but when you hold it to the window the low sun lights up a faint cat, the same one curled on your drawer handle. By the time you reach the platform the man is already at the far end, and the 4.40 is pulling out with its brakes whining.

You turn back. The shelf is empty. On the dusty sill, in the shape of a small paw, sits a print made of the same tiny dots that cover the watch. You fill in the ledger slowly: Found, one watch. Found, one cat. Neither claimed.

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