Colour tattoo on a limb of a grey tabby cat with a raised paw, a woman with red hair holding purple irises, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tabby cat and woman with irises

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a grey tabby cat with green eyes and a raised paw, with the body of a woman with auburn hair and closed eyes, who holds a bunch of purple irises and wears a teal garment. Bold black outlines define the forms, with soft grey shading on the cat's fur and tail and painted colour on the flowers, hair and clothing. The cat's body wraps around the woman, forming a single composition that fills the frame.

Neo-trad Other Cat Tabby cat Woman Iris Flower

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last iris bulb on Halloran Ring rotted in the third cycle, so I stopped expecting the cat to bring anything useful home. Marrow came back to the hydroponic bay each night smelling of the outer hull, shaking dust from her grey coat like a woman shaking out a cloak. Nobody had kept a cat since the quarantine. The council called her a rumour until she sat on the dosing panel and stared down the inspector until he signed her off.

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Then she brought the irises. Three stems, violet, throats striped gold, wrapped in a strip of teal insulation foil and held against her chest with one forepaw. I asked where she had found them. She only blinked, slow and green-eyed, and padded off down the spine toward the sealed seed vault. I followed her through the airlock and found the door already open and the old archive lockers stripped to bare frame. Only one panel remained, a painted portrait of a red-haired woman bent over a bunch of flowers, her long body curling down into something furred and striped that trailed off the bottom edge of the canvas.

I knew then that the woman in the portrait had been the gardener of the first ring, the one who smuggled bulbs up in her coat before the blight. Marrow stepped onto the lower rail and laid her raised paw against the painted fingers, as if checking they were still warm. Her tail flicked once across the teal folds of the gown, and the picture gave a faint hum, the same note the water pumps made when a new cycle began.

By morning the bay was full of irises. I did not ask Marrow how she had carried so many, and she did not tell me. She lay in the middle of the largest bed, purring at the grow-lights, one paw still lifted as though she had only just let go of something.