Black and grey realism tattoo of a tabby cat's face on the middle finger of a hand, with yellow-green eyes and shaded fur.

Tabby cat face on a finger

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A tabby cat's face is tattooed across the top of a finger, facing forwards with its ears reaching the knuckle joint. The fur is built up with soft grey shading and dark tabby stripes, while the eyes carry the only yellow-green colour. A plain pale background and a ring on the neighbouring finger frame the hand.

Realism Hand Cat Tabby cat Cat face Animal Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came up the shingle path the week the herring boats stayed in harbour, a grey-striped thing with a torn ear and eyes like the lamp in the chandler's window. Mrs Tennant kept the boarding house at the top of Gull Steps and had three lodgers and no patience for animals, so she set a saucer of fish skin on the back step and told the cat it could stay until the rent fell due.

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The lodgers grumbled that it sat on the banister and watched them eat. It never came down to the dining room. Each night at the turn of the tide it walked the length of the landing, stopping at every door, then went out to the wall above the harbour and looked south across the water until the lighthouse had made its full turn. Old Harold, who had sailed that coast for forty years, said cats that watched the sea were called keepers, and a keeper's business was to know when a boat was late.

In February a fishing smack did not come home. The coastguard lit flares along the breakwater and the village stood in its coats on the quay. The cat went down the Steps alone, past the chapel and the bakery, and sat at the edge of the water with its tail folded round its feet. Nobody thought to follow it until first light, when the smack came in under a single patched sail, lame but whole, and the cat was already there to see it.

Mrs Tennant never charged the cat rent. When it died, years later, she buried it under the harbour wall and set a saucer on the stone. The saucer still fills with rain each morning, and the lighthouse turns over it every night, slow and patient, the way the cat taught her to watch.