Painted Japanese-style design of a tabby cat with a white dragon wrapped around its body and red flames along its tail, shown as a drawing with no body placement.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tabby cat and dragon design

Japanese · Mixed · Flash

A painted design on pale grey paper shows a tabby cat seated in profile with its head turned towards the viewer, its green eyes and striped brown and cream fur clearly drawn. A white dragon with red-finned details and pale blue scales coils across the cat's body and out towards the lower right, with red flames trailing along a tail-like form at the edge. The linework is bold and the shading is soft and watercolour-like, with the cat rendered mainly in browns and cream and the dragon and flames in red, grey and blue.

Japanese Cat Tabby cat Dragon Flame Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mott had been sitting on the bin store roof since the last bus, and Tomasz Okafor, who kept the all-night laundrette on Marrow Lane, was fairly sure it had been watching the street the whole time. It sat the way cats sit when they own the place, tail wrapped round its feet, green eyes fixed on the rain-slicked pavement.

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Inside, the dryers turned with a patient knock, and the tin on the counter held the week's coppers. Tomasz filled a cracked saucer with milk and set it by the back door, the way his mother had done for every cat on the terrace. Mott came down the drainpipe at midnight, drank, and then went very still, ears flat, staring past him at the lane.

Three lads came round the corner with a petrol can, laughing too loudly, aiming for the skip full of old mattresses. Mott dropped from the roof without a sound. Something pale unspooled from beneath its striped fur, finned and white, with eyes like frozen puddles, and a line of red fire ran from its jaws along the lip of the skip. The can slipped from a boy's hands. The lads were gone before the flames had finished climbing the wall, and the fire folded itself back into the cat like a sleeve being rolled up.

By dawn the lane was grey and wet again. Tomasz found the saucer licked clean and a single red scale resting in the bottom of it, warm as a coin. Mott was asleep on the lid of the big dryer, one cream paw tucked under, and when he reached to lift it away the cat opened one eye, looked at him as though he were the one who needed guarding, and went back to sleep.