Back of a woman with a large realistic black and grey tattoo of sphynx cats, a skull and roses covering the upper and lower back.

Sphynx cats and roses across a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A woman seen from behind with a large black and grey tattoo covering most of her back. Two sphynx cats are shown in detail, with a skull above them and roses at the lower edges, and two hairless cats are perched on her shoulders. The shading is soft and detailed, with fine linework and smooth grey gradients across the whole composition.

Realism Back Sphynx cat Cat Skull Rose Figure

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cats were the first thing the chandler's boy warned you about, and the last thing you expected to love. Three of them lived in the forecastle of the Mary Ashworth, hairless and grey as wet slate, their skin warm as bread left on a sill. Nobody had bothered to name them, so you gave them the saints the old hands swore by: Brendan, Agnes, and the one with the torn ear, who answered to nothing at all.

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By the fortieth day out of Valparaíso the rats had gone quiet, and the cook had started saving the fish heads for the cats. The bosun, a Cornishman called Tregear, kept a whaler's skull wrapped in oilcloth in his locker. He swore a ship's cat was the only luck worth carrying round the Horn, and that the skull was the only company a man could trust to keep its mouth shut. You thought he was drunk. Then the captain's wife's roses, sent out in a tin box from Bristol, went to bare stalks in the cold, all but one bloom that kept opening in the lee of the galley wall.

The gale came on the forty-sixth night. The sea broke over the rail like a dropped wall, and you lost the lamp, a length of rope and very nearly yourself. When the bell finally sounded dawn, you found Agnes wedged under the galley stove, purring like a kettle. Brendan sat on the cook's chest licking salt from his flank. The torn-eared one was gone, and you were already reaching for the shrouds when the bosun said he had seen it climb the mainmast with the last petal in its teeth.

You went up after it because there was nothing else to do. From the crosstrees the ship looked small and unfinished, the sea stretching grey to the edge of the world. The cat sat on the yard, unhurried, the petal between its teeth, and it did not look down at you once. It had been steering this voyage the whole time, and it waited, patiently, for you to notice.