Sepia line drawing of a steampunk cat wearing a clockwork top hat and brass goggles, with a pocket watch and mechanical butterfly, as a tattoo design.

Steampunk cat in top hat with gears

Black and grey · Flash

A cat in profile wears a patterned top hat set with clock faces and cogs, brass goggles with gear detailing, and a chain-linked pocket watch. A filigree mechanical butterfly sits at the upper left, and a half-timbered townhouse with a wooden door and cobbled street fills the background. The fine stippled linework and soft shading are rendered in a single sepia-toned ink.

Cat Top hat Clockwork Gear Goggles Pocket watch Butterfly Clock face

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mabel Quill had kept the clock tower of Little Cobwick for thirty-one years, and in all that time the cat had never once asked to be let in. He simply appeared on the workshop sill at dusk, tall hat tipped at its usual rakish angle, brass goggles pushed up over one ear. That evening he came with a silver chain in his teeth, and at the end of it swung a pocket watch that had stopped at a quarter past nine.

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"Where did you find that?" she asked, though she already knew. The watch had belonged to the miller's boy, who had walked out past the weir the winter before and never walked back. The cat dropped it at her feet, turned, and led her down the lane past the half-timbered houses, their leaded windows dark, until they reached a low arch on Tanner's Row. He sat before a door of old oak and tapped the iron ring once with a paw, the way a clerk knocks for a debt long overdue.

The cellar beyond was dry and smelled of oil. Shelves ran the length of it, and on every shelf sat clocks: mantel clocks, carriage clocks, a grandfather clock with its face turned to the wall. Each one had been taken apart and laid out with care, every cog numbered in chalk. Mabel understood then that the cat had been mending the town's time by night for years, quietly, while the bells rang the hours above him and no one thought to ask who kept them.

She found the boy's name scratched inside the watch case and set the watch on the bench beside the others. Then she wound it, and the hands began to move. Upstairs, far off, the tower clock struck the quarter. When she looked around, the cat was already trotting back up the lane, goggles glinting, as if he had only come to check the time.