Close-up of a traditional style tattoo of a small ginger cat with black outlines, placed on a forearm beside a large ornate design in purple and yellow.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small ginger cat on a traditional arm piece

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A small ginger cat with closed eyes and a raised tail is the focal point, drawn with bold black outlines and simple orange and cream shading. Surrounding it are larger ornamental shapes in purple, yellow and black, which look like a scrolling design with a toothed element. A 20 pence coin has been placed on the skin for scale, and the photo is taken close up and straight on.

Traditional Forearm Cat Kitten Ornament Scroll Skull

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sergeant-Keeper Ilse Varrow had counted the treasury every night for nineteen years, and every night the same ginger cat watched her from the top of the strongbox, tail raised like a flag nobody had asked him to carry. The cat belonged to nobody in the palace of Carrow Vale. The cooks fed him, the grooms called him Pennyweight, and the king, who was afraid of most things, had decreed that he was never to be moved.

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The trouble began with the ledgers. The chancellor had found a shortfall of exactly twenty pence in the copper stores and wanted a head for it. Ilse knew where the coin had gone. A week earlier she had seen Pennyweight bat it across the cellar flagstones and into the drain grate, then sit down with his eyes shut as though the whole matter bored him.

She went down with a lantern and a bent hairpin. The coin was wedged against the iron bars, green at the edges, and the cat followed her step by step, purring like a kettle that had not quite decided to boil. When she had worked it free, he rose, stretched, and walked ahead of her up the stone stairs with his tail held high, never once looking back to see whether she kept up.

The chancellor weighed the coin in his palm and frowned at the Queen's profile, which had worn almost smooth. "Sound enough," he said at last, and wrote a new line beneath the shortfall in his neat hand: a clerk's error, corrected. Pennyweight, settled on the open ledger, closed his eyes and did not move for the rest of the audit.