Fine line black fish tattoo on the upper back of a person with a tabby kitten held against their shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small fish tattoo on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A person is seen from behind with bare shoulders and upper back, holding a tabby kitten against one shoulder. A small black outline of a fish sits below the shoulder blade, with a few tiny marks above it that are too small to read. The soft, warm lighting and green background give the photo a film-like feel, with the kitten's face in sharp focus.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kitten came off the Tuesday ferry inside a fish crate, wrapped in my uncle's oilskin, and she had already bitten the purser before anyone thought to ask her name. Nobody on Inish Corran would take her. Cats were a fine thing on the mainland, my aunt said, where they had proper houses to sit in, but a cat on an island counted the boats in and out and expected a share of every catch.

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So I kept her. She rode in the wheelhouse of the Morag while I hauled creels with my father, and she learned the sound of the engine before she learned her own name. She would sit on the coil of rope at the stern and watch the water slide past as though it owed her money. When the gulls came down over the mackerel she lifted one paw and batted at the air, and my father, who had not laughed since the winter the herring failed, laughed until he had to sit down on the hatch.

The summer I left for Glasgow, I asked the tattooist in Oban to put a fish on me, small enough to hide under a collar. He drew it freehand while I talked about the crate. He said fish were the easiest thing in the world to draw and the hardest to draw well, because you had to leave the water out. I didn't understand him until my father's letter came, two lines in capitals: the cat had gone off the stern after a gull, the sea had kept her, and he had put the crate by the door in case.

She came back up the slip nine days later, soaked and furious, and he carried her home under one arm like a rolled sail. He wrote to tell me so. He didn't mention the fish, but he had underlined the word wet three times, which was as near as he ever came to a joke.

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