Black line drawing of a stylised cat sitting upright with a raised paw, its body filled with flowing swirl linework on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised swirl cat line drawing

Black and grey · Flash

A single-line outline drawing of a cat sitting upright with one paw raised and its head turned to the side. The body and tail are filled with flowing spiral and swirl linework, giving a decorative, stylised look. The design is drawn in black on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Cat Swirl Spiral Line drawing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourselves down, the lot of you, the kettle isn't boiled and the tide won't turn until I'm done. You've all seen the cat on the harbour wall at Scarrow, sat up like a bishop with one paw lifted, asking the boats to wait. Her name was Spill, and she came out of a lobster creel the winter the Ellis boy knocked paraffin over the net shed.

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That winter the sea took three boats and the wind took the chapel roof, and the islanders said the swirls in her coat were the tide's own handwriting. Every line curled back on itself, and if you traced one with a finger you'd end up going round the wrong way and somewhere you hadn't meant to go. Nobody believed a word of it until the night the Maid of Lewisay went out in the squall with young Ruaridh Ellis at the tiller.

Spill sat on the wall and lifted her paw towards the Skerries and would not come down. Hamish Gunn swore at her, then saw she wasn't looking at the rocks at all but at the swell curling white round them, and something in the way she turned her head made him take the lantern and walk the breakwater. He found the boat's painter snagged on the lower rung. He found Ruaridh bailing with his coat off and his hands bleeding.

They say you can still see her on the wall when the weather's turning, sitting up straight with her paw in the air. Hamish always said she was only waving the boats in, and he never once let anybody call it a miracle in his hearing. But he left a saucer of milk on that wall every night until the day he died, and he set it facing the sea.