Colour Japanese style tattoo of a stretched white cat with black skulls and red eyes over teal waves on the top of a foot, with a red crab on the ankle.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stretching cat with skulls on a foot

Japanese · Ankle · Mixed · Photo

A white cat stretches along the top of a foot, its body patterned with black skulls that have red eyes and teal wave motifs. A long tail curls up towards the ankle, where a red crab is tattooed. The bold outlines and flat colour fills give the piece a clean, graphic finish against the dark background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Osei had sold fish at the harbour market for thirty years, and in all that time the grey cat that slept on her stall had never once stood up before noon. So when she came back from the tide-line one morning to find it stretched the full length of the quay, belly to the stones, tail lifted like a question, she set down her basket and waited for it to explain itself.

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It did not explain itself. It yawned, and the yawn went on for a long while, and when it finished she saw that the stones behind it were no longer stones but the crests of small dark waves, each one carrying a skull that grinned up at the sky with two red eyes. The crab that had been scuttling across the quay for days stopped at the cat's paw and looked up at her with the patience of a creature that knew the tide better than she did.

The cat kept its eyes half shut and let her understand, without any fuss, that she had been carrying other people's bad luck home in that basket. Every skull on its back was a fisherman who had not come back. It wore them only so they would not slip into the sea and forget the way.

Osei looked at the crab, then at the water, then at the grey fur gone white at the edges. She tipped the day's catch onto the stones, the bream and the mackerel, and the cat rose, stretched once more, and walked into the surf without wetting a whisker. The crab went after it. Osei swept the scales into the gutter and, for the first time in years, did not check the sky before she went home.

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