Black line drawing of a snarling cat with a scaled body, clawed paws and blossom flowers, in a Japanese style tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snarling cat with scales and flowers

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A black linework drawing of a snarling cat with bared fangs and whiskers, its body coiling into scaled sections and clawed paws gripping at the lower centre. Blossom flowers and diagonal ribbon-like bands fill the background around the figure. The lines are bold and even with no shading or colour, drawn on pale tracing paper.

Japanese Cat Scale Claw Flower Blossom Ribbon Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat had been sleeping in the bell tower of Ossery for nine winters, and nobody in the market town thought to ask why the bells rang crooked on the nights the river froze. Tobiah Wenn, who mended the harbour nets, went up the rotten stair one March with a lantern and a bag of dried herring, meaning only to shame the creature out of his loft. He found it awake, wide-jawed and furious, its whiskers stiff as hay wire, coiled around the bell rope like a thing that had grown there. Its scales caught the lantern light in rows, and between them, pressed into the oak beams, were blossoms he had never seen growing anywhere in Ossery.

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"You ring the bell for the drowned," the cat said, though its mouth never seemed to close around the words. "Every time a boat goes under, I must tell it to the sea, and the sea must hear it in my voice. Nine winters I have sung your dead home. My teeth are tired."

Tobiah set the herring down. He was a man who understood debts, and he offered the only one he had, which was the net he had been mending for his own son, lost off the Caul rocks the autumn before. The cat took it in its clawed paws, ribbons of cloth unwinding from its body like river mist, and it bit the mesh once, cleanly, through the knot.

In the morning the bell rang straight for the first time in nine years, and the drowned stopped knocking at the harbour wall. Tobiah still climbs the stair each March with herring. He says he goes to be scolded, and he always comes down smiling, and there are no boats at the Caul rocks now, only a fine, bright blossom caught in the rigging of every pier.