Bold black ink tattoo of a striped cat with a curled tail on the shoulder blade area of a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Striped cat with curled tail on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a stylised cat in solid black outline, with its tail curling upwards and its head turned towards the viewer. The tail and body are filled with bold black stripes and swirling inner linework, with no visible grey shading. The design sits centrally on smooth skin against a plain, softly lit background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came aboard at Hull with a rope burn across her nose and no name, so I called her Tallow after the fat I rendered for the lamps. She took to the galley at once. By the second day she had claimed the warm lid of the copper boiler, and every time the swell lifted the bow she rode it with her tail up like a bent brass hook, stripes bold as the bars on my oven grate.

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We were four days out past the Dogger when the weather turned. The stores flooded through the pantry hatch, flour going to paste and the salt pork floating in its brine. The lads were all bailing in the waist, and I was on my knees in the galley with a bucket when I saw Tallow sitting at the foot of the ladder. She wouldn't go up to the dry bunks. She just turned her head towards me and waited, the way you'd wait for someone to stop dawdling.

I followed her. Ten minutes later a sea took the pantry door clean off its hinges, and the whole cold store poured into the bilge where I had been kneeling.

We docked at Hull on the Thursday with the sun out and the quay smelling of tar. Tallow walked down the gangway ahead of me, tail up, not looking back once, as though she had only ever been visiting. I kept the copper lid warm for her every shift after that, and I never did tell the skipper what she had done.

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From the plentytattoo archive, uploaded by a user. Is this your work? Ask for credit or removal.