Small black and grey tattoo of a tabby cat lying on its side with a red collar, placed on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tabby cat tattoo on a thigh

Fine line · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A small tattoo of a tabby cat lying on its side, with its head turned up and a red collar at the neck. The linework is fine and the striped coat is built up with grey shading and dark accents. Black ink dominates, with only a small touch of red on the collar, and the design sits on the upper thigh against a plain background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the fire on Halden Reach is only good for one more telling before the cold comes through the hull. Now, the tabby. Everyone on the Greywater knows her, though most of you were not born when she came aboard at the Vesk breaking yards, a striped scrap of a thing hidden in a crate of salvaged seed stock. The engineers wanted her put out through the airlock. Old Marisol Okonkwo said no, and tied a loop of red ration-foil at the cat's neck so the crew could tell her from the rats.

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She took to the cargo spine straight away. Nobody taught her to lie on her side in the warm dust above the reactor coils, belly to the heat, one forepaw hanging over the rail as if she owned the ship's time. When the alarm sounded in the third year of the long dark, she was the only one who did not run. She lay there with her head tipped back toward the vent grille, eyes narrowed, listening to the groan of the hull. That was how the crew learned the crack was in the aft seal before the sensors did.

Marisol died the winter after the Reach was charted, and the foil ribbon rotted off in the recyclers. The crew had a brass tag cast for the cat's collar instead, and it is still there, though the metal has gone dark with handling. Every shift, someone rubs it for luck before taking the long ladder down to the coils.

And when you see her lying there, striped flank to the warmth, do not wake her. She has done her watch. She has earned her sleep.

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