Black fine line tattoo of a stylised cat with curling scroll flourishes on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Stylised cat with swirls on upper back

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised cat sits in profile, with a pointed ear, an arched back and a long curving tail. Flowing black scrolls and tapering lines wrap around its body and tail, and the linework is clean and even. The ink is solid black on pale skin, and the tattoo sits off-centre on the upper back with plain background around it.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Tuesday, and the bread came out of the oven looking like wet sails, which Cook says is my fault for trusting the damper. I spent the forenoon scraping soot off the range while Marrow sat on the warm rail above it, pretending the heat was her idea. She will not come down for the fish, only for the pot of dripping, and she takes it with the ceremony of a bishop.

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This morning I found her tail had worked its way round the handle of the copper ladle, the tip curled back on itself like the end of a drawn-out sigh. I sat on an upturned crate and tried to copy it on the back of a flour docket, and got three loops before the ship lurched and my pencil went off the edge. Cook laughed and said a cat does not need drawing to be a cat, which is the sort of thing he says when he has no answer.

Stores came aboard at Gravesend with a clerk who wanted to count the tins. He counted nineteen and missed the cat, which the cat took as a personal insult. She walked the length of the deck with her back up and her tail sweeping a long curve behind her, and every sailor who saw it stepped aside.

Tonight the lamp is low and she is asleep against the flour sacks, her tail wrapped twice round her own feet, neat as a knot. I have left the docket where it fell. If the ship goes down in the Channel, I hope somebody finds that scrap and reads it as a sum of loops, and not as a complaint about the bread.

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