Colour Japanese-style tattoo of a stretching calico cat, filled with cherry blossom and fan patterns, on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stretching calico cat on ribs

Japanese · Ribs · Colour · Photo

A calico cat lies stretched out with its front paws raised and its tail curled, outlined in dark black linework. The body is filled with patterns of cherry blossoms, red and green leaves and yellow fans on a white ground, with the orange and black patches of the cat's coat in solid colour. The design runs diagonally along the side of the ribs against smooth skin, with a black bralette at the top of the frame and part of another tattoo visible at the lower left.

Japanese Ribs Cat Cherry blossom Fan Floral pattern Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the lot of you, and mind the cat. Yes, that one, stretched across the warm flags as if she owns the inn, which she does. Don't call her plain. Her mother was a dyer's cat from the Hakone hills, and the dyer made the mother a coat from the silk he'd spoiled, so every patch of her is a scrap of some lord's wedding robe. That is why the cherry blossom runs the length of her flank and the painted fans sit folded on her hip.

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The snow came over the Shiroyama pass three days ago and shut the road behind a clerk named Tobin Reeve, who arrived soaked to the bone with a lacquered box tucked under his coat. He would not open it. He drank his rice wine by the hearth and watched the cat, and the cat watched him back, the way cats do when they know your business better than you. On the third night she rolled over and reached one paw up towards the beam, and the blossoms on her belly shivered as if a draught had got into the ink.

Tobin broke then. The box held a debt, forty years old, owed by his grandfather to the dyer, and a signed promise that the dyer's line would be paid in kind. Nobody has ever looked at a cat as hard as that clerk looked at her. Then she got up, shook the snow from her coat, and walked out the door into the drift. By dawn the drift had closed over every trace of him, and the road was clear.

Next morning the innkeeper found a single pale petal pressed into the step, and the cat asleep in the sun with her legs stretched long, not one fan out of place. So if a stranger pays you in silk, friends, check he isn't carrying a cat's debt in his coat. Now, who wants the one about the kettle?