Black and grey tattoo of a tabby cat with a bow inside an ornate oval frame, placed on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tabby cat in an ornate frame on a thigh

Dotwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A tabby cat with large eyes and a bow at its chin is shown inside an oval mirror-style frame decorated with scrolling foliage. The cat is built from fine stippled dots and hatched lines, with heavier black outlines on the frame and the bow. The design is entirely in black ink and grey tones, filling the thigh in a centred composition.

Dotwork Realism Thigh Cat Tabby cat Frame Bow Polka dot Foliage Mirror

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mirror had come off a dead woman's dressing table, Mrs Tulloch swore, and she had hung it in the net loft at Scarhaven so the crews could check their collars before Sunday chapel. Nobody checked anything in it but Biscuit. The ship's tabby had worked out, sometime in the autumn gales, that the creature on the glass was worth looking at, and he climbed the ladder every morning to sit before it with his ears flat and his eyes gone round as herring pennies.

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Daniel Ferrier, who mended nets with his thumbs bleeding, said the cat was simply vain. Cats were vain, his father had said, the way gulls were loud. But Biscuit was not looking at his own face. He was looking past it, at the curling brass of the frame, where a bow of spotted ribbon had been tied by a girl from the cannery office who had lost a bet about the tide. Spots were lucky on a boat, she had said, and the cat had never been on one that didn't come home.

The Brenda Mae went out on the Thursday with the wind backing north-east and the glass falling like a stone down a well. Only the cat came up the ladder that night to watch the empty hooks. He sat before the mirror until the lamp guttered, and when the boats came grinding in under a grey dawn, Ferrier stood in the loft doorway with salt in his beard and found the tabby still there, staring at the ribbon.

Ferrier took the spotted bow from the frame, looped it twice round the cat's neck, and tied it under his chin. For the first time in a month, the mirror showed two faces looking pleased with themselves.