Neo-trad tattoo of a black cat with sugar skull face paint, red roses and green leaves, with small stars at the top left.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull cat with red roses

Neo-trad · Mixed · Photo

A black cat with yellow eyes wears red and white sugar skull face paint, with a small red heart above the eyes and a patterned scroll at the forehead. Two large red roses with green leaves sit at the lower left, and small stars appear at the top left. Bold dark outlines and smooth colour shading give the design a traditional feel, and the composition is tightly framed on the skin.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Day of the Dead fell on a Thursday that year, and Nan Ostrowski came down the towpath with a tin of cosmetic white and a paper bag of red sweets, insisting the cat needed a face to match the season. Tuesday objected from the cabin roof. Nan didn't mind. She had painted faces on half the children in Mossley, she said, and a cat was only a small child with better manners.

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We sat on the back deck while the paint dried in the cold. Nan drew the scrolls in red around each yellow eye, a tiny heart above the bridge of the nose, and a row of white teeth along the jaw. Tuesday let her, which was how I knew Nan had some magic in her hands. Across the cut, smoke from the allotment bonfires leaned towards the lock, and someone in a back garden was playing a trumpet badly and with great feeling.

Nan died in January, and the boat went quiet the way a clock does when it stops. Tuesday took to sitting on the roof at dusk, the hour Nan always used to arrive, watching the towpath with her painted face. I bought red roses from the stall in Uppermill and tied them to the rail because it seemed the thing to do. The petals dropped onto the water, and the cat didn't look down.

On the evening of the first of November I found her gone from the roof. I followed her prints in the frost along the towpath to the lock, where she sat facing the bend with her tail wrapped round her feet. I sat down beside her. We waited together, the two of us painted for a feast nobody else had come to, until a light came round the bend and a boat slid slowly into the lock.

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