Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a stylised sitting cat with a curled tail, on the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised sitting cat with curled tail

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A slender, stylised cat sits upright with its head turned slightly, whiskers extending from both sides of its face, and its tail curling into a spiral at the bottom left. The head and body are filled with fine stippled dotwork shading, while the tail and whiskers are rendered in clean, even black outline. The design is in black ink only, centred on smooth skin with plain, neutral lighting.

Dotwork Other Cat Sitting cat Tail Whiskers Spiral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you, where the lamp reaches. No, the cat was not a cat of this side or that. Ask any guard on the Sallow Bridge and he'll tell you it walked over the line at dusk, because the line had been drawn in ink on a map, and cats have never once learned to read a map.

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The customs man in the wooden hut was called Tomas Greave, and he had one rule about animals: they paid the fee like everybody else. The cat sat on the white barrier with its tail wound round its feet. It was thin as a candle and grey as the river mist, and when Tomas held out his palm for the coin, it looked past him at the far lights as though he were a shop sign it had already read. Its shadow stayed behind on the tarmac of the far side. Nobody noticed that until morning.

So the cat said, in a voice like a drawer sliding shut, that it had no coin but it knew the price of everything. It would pay in stories, one for each side of the gate. Tomas laughed, stamped its paper, and the cat walked through with its tail lifting like a question mark.

For forty years after, Tomas kept a ledger, and beside every date he wrote the name of whoever had crossed. Beside the cat's date he drew a small curl, and when his granddaughter asked what it meant, he only said that some debts are paid in the currency of tails. Then he would smile and take his coffee black, the way the cat had taken its own silence.