Traditional style tattoo of a snarling black cat with yellow eyes and a red tongue, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snarling black cat on a forearm

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A black cat or panther-like animal crouches low with its tail raised, baring fangs and a red tongue. The bold black outlines are filled with solid black ink and fine hatched strokes for fur, with red accents on the ears and mouth and orange-yellow eyes and claws. The design fills the centre of the frame against a dark, plain background.

Traditional Forearm Cat Panther Animal Fangs

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You know the Sallow Quay cats by their rumours before you know their names, and the one everyone crosses the road for is a black tom called Vesper who has never once let a man pick him up. He sits on the bollard outside the chandlers with his tail up like a wrong question, and when the gulls come down to the fish boxes he drops off the stone, hackles lifting in a ridge along his back, and goes for them with that open mouth, red as a pillar box inside.

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The night the Mary Ellen came in low on her marks, you were the only one awake on the mole, counting lamps because the chandler's boy had said the bar would close early. Vesper came down the wet steps at a crouch and stopped at your boots. He would not come closer. He stared past you at the black water inside the wall, where a skiff's painter had gone slack, and he gave the sound a cat makes when it has seen something in the dark it wants you to see too.

You followed him. The skiff was drifting toward the sluice gate with one oar gone, and a lad from the Cutler's yard lay curled in its bottom asleep with a bottle in his coat. You got the boathook on the ring and hauled, your shout brought the night-watch running, and by the time the skiff was tied fast Vesper had gone back up the steps to his bollard.

Next morning he sat there as if none of it had happened, tail up, one orange-gold eye half closed against the sun. Nobody on the quay has ever managed to stroke him. You carry a scrap of mackerel down every day now and set it on the stone at a distance, and he watches you the way a harbourmaster watches a tide table, sure the sea will do what it has always done.