Black linework tattoo of a hairless sphynx cat with a jewelled pendant, framed by scrollwork and beads, with a rose below, on the upper thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sphynx cat and rose on a thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

The design shows a hairless sphynx cat facing forwards, with a dark pendant on its forehead, set inside an ornate oval frame of scrollwork and hanging beads. A detailed rose sits at the base of the frame, with a short beaded drop below it. The work is done in clean black outline with fine hatching on the cat's face and fur, with no colour ink, and it fills the upper thigh against a pale background.

Botanical Thigh Cat Sphynx cat Rose Pendant Bead Frame Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had already buried the lower road when the carter's boy came stumbling into the inn at Hollin Gap, his hat gone and his hands raw. Behind him, on the wind, came a thin mewing that nobody in the valley had heard since old Marthe Coyle was carried down to the churchyard. Ask anyone at the gap and they will tell you the cat was hairless as a peeled egg, with a black stone hung from a chain on its brow, and that it had never once been seen to walk on snow.

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The landlord swore he would not send a man up after a cat. Then the boy said the stone was glowing through the drift like a coal left in the grate, and the carter's wife, who had been Marthe's niece, pulled on her boots. They went up by the chapel wall, past the rose bush Marthe had pruned every March, its black stems bent under ice. The cat sat on the lintel of the chapel door, grey-pink and shivering, and did not move when they reached for it. It only turned its head toward the path below, where three shapes lay in the drift.

They dug them out before dark: two carters and a mule, all breathing, all lost in the white where the road bends at the cairn. Nobody could say how the cat had known. Marthe had once told the niece that the stone was only a bead from her mother's rosary, and that a cat remembers every road it has ever walked, the way the old women remember names.

Next spring the rose came out early, its petals pale as the cat's skin. The niece hung a second bead on the chapel chain, and the cat, which had never cared for company, let her stroke its ears.