Black and white flash drawing of a snarling spotted leopard gripping a knife, with a pistol across the front and Cyrillic lettering above and below.

Snarling leopard with knife and pistol

Black and grey · Flash

A black and white drawing of a snarling, spotted big cat with bared fangs and wide eyes, shown alongside a pistol and a dagger held in a clawed paw. Cyrillic lettering runs across the top and a further word sits in block capitals beneath the pistol. The linework is bold and heavily hatched, with solid black areas and no colour.

Leopard Big cat Snarl Knife Dagger Pistol Gun Spots Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crates came off the Ardent with the cat already inside one, and nobody on the quay could say who had nailed the lid down from the outside. It was spotted like wet slate and as big as a yearling calf, and when the lid split it stood up on the cobbles and showed every tooth it owned. The dockers called it the Quayward, left it bread and cured herring, and did not ask where it slept.

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Everyone knew the rule without anyone writing it down. Whatever was said in the warehouse stayed in the warehouse. A man who carried talk to the harbour master found his boots full of tar by morning, or his mooring lines cut through, or his wife's washing floating in the basin. Nobody saw the cat do these things. It simply sat on the bollards and watched with wide eyes, and the tar appeared.

Ned Pascoe, who kept the tally for the weigh-house, was young and believed in ledgers. He wrote down the short weights, the sacks of salt that came in light, and the names beside them. One wet night he walked to the harbour master's lodge with the book under his coat. When he came back past the fish market the leopard was sitting on his doorstep. It did not move. It only breathed through its nose and let him step round it.

In the morning the tally book was blank in every column, and the short weights had been put right by men who had never been asked. Ned went down to the quay with his hands at his sides and his mouth shut. The cat, bored now, padded back to the bollards. The old dockers say its teeth were only for show, and that it was the silence that bit.