Japanese style tattoo of a stretched black cat with orange chrysanthemum patterning and green leaves on a lower leg.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stretching black cat with chrysanthemum

Japanese · Calf · Colour · Photo

A black cat stretches forward with its tail raised, its body patterned with orange chrysanthemum petals and a yellow centre. Green leaves sit beneath its belly and legs. The bold outlines and solid black fill contrast with the flat orange and green areas against an orange background.

Japanese Calf Cat Black cat Chrysanthemum Flower Leaves Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came up the Ashgrove road the summer the well at Corran Wells went dry, and nobody could say who had let it out of wherever it had been kept. It was black as a boot heel and it walked with its tail raised like a question. Mrs Adeyemi at the petrol halt put down a saucer of tinned milk, and by evening the cat had taken the warm step by her door as its own.

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Every driver on that road knew the story of the orange flower that opened on the dunes after the first rain. Nobody had seen it bloom in living memory. The old ones said a cat would walk the flower out of the sand, stretching its whole length across the ground to find where the water had gone. So when a dust storm buried the marker posts, Tomasz Brand and his nephew Eli took the lorry out to look for the blacktop and found the cat already waiting, forepaws flat, back drawn long, pointing down the road like a finger.

They followed it for three hours through the glare. Where the cat's belly brushed the sand, green leaves came up behind it, and petals unfolded along its back, orange and gold, until the animal looked less like a beast than a flowering hedge walking on four legs. It led them to a shallow spring under a split rock, drank, and looked back at them with eyes the colour of old brass. When Eli reached for it, the cat was already stretching out of sight over the stones.

Eli filled the jerrycans. In the morning the petals had gone from the sand, but the road ran straight and true to Corran Wells again. Ever since, drivers on the Ashgrove road leave a saucer on the bonnet at the last bend, and they do not stop to look for the cat.