Traditional black and grey tattoo of a stretching cat on a cushion beneath an Easy Life banner, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stretching black cat with Easy Life banner

Traditional · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A black cat arches its back and stretches its front legs across a dark cushion, with its tail curling up at the left. A banner reading EASY LIFE and two small star shapes sit above and beside it, and a dagger and a lantern appear in the background at the edges of the frame. The work uses bold black outlines with grey shading on the cat and cushion, and there is no colour ink.

Traditional Forearm Cat Banner Star Dagger Lantern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have been told the cushion belongs to Hermias, the scribe who keeps his ledgers on the bench beside the lamp in the granary at Alexandria. You have also been told a great many things about yourself by people who never once managed to shift you from it. The sacks are damp this month, the rats are fat and insolent, and the dagger the overseer hangs on the nail by the door has not cut anything more dangerous than string since the summer the Nile ran low.

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Hermias comes in at dusk with the lantern, its brass shutter ticking as it cools, and stands over you with the face of a man composing a complaint to the gods. He tries to lift you. You go limp, then rigid, then you stretch, back arched, forepaws pushed out across the worn seam of the cushion, the way a thing stretches when it has nowhere urgent to be. He sighs. He has sighed at you for six years and has never once won.

That night a boy from the harbour bursts in shouting that a grain ship has been sighted past the lighthouse and the stores must be counted, sealed and carried down before dawn. Everyone runs. Hermias runs with the ledger clamped under his arm and the lantern swinging wildly. You do not run. You stay where you are while the sacks are hauled past your door, listening to the shouting shrink towards the quay.

By morning the granary is quiet and the rats have the run of the place. Hermias returns grey with exhaustion, finds the cushion still warm, and stops in the doorway. Then he sits down on the far edge, careful not to disturb you, and you allow it. It is, you decide, a very easy life, and he may have the rest of it.