A woman holds a tabby kitten in front of her forearm, which has a colourful traditional-style rose and flower tattoo, with a small crescent moon on her hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tabby kitten held beside a floral forearm tattoo

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman in a black top holds a tabby kitten up to the camera, with her face cropped out of frame. Her left forearm carries bold colour linework of red and pink roses with green leaves, and her right forearm shows fine black floral and lotus-style linework. The soft indoor lighting and close framing keep the tattoos and kitten as the main focus.

Traditional Botanical Forearm Hand Cat Kitten Rose Flower Lotus Crescent moon

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit down, the kettle can wait, because you will not hear this properly with your coat still on. Every grandmother on the north shore knew the tabby kitten of Mell Head, the one who came ashore in a fish crate the winter the harbour froze. She was no bigger than a loaf, with eyes the grey-blue of sea before a squall, and nobody claimed her, so the lighthouse keeper's daughter took her in and called her Thimble.

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Thimble had one habit. Each night she climbed the rose hedge behind the chapel and sat with her paws tucked under her, watching the moon sink into the lotus pool the widow Ahern had planted, though nothing should flower on a cold island like ours. The lotus opened for her every time. The old folk said the moon liked her better than the rest of us, and maybe it did.

One still night the moon went down into the pool and did not come up. The water lay black and flat, and the whole shore was lost in it. Thimble went down the chapel steps, walked straight into the pool, and paddled out with her ears flat and her tail like a bell rope. She hooked the silver off the bottom with one claw, carried it back in her teeth like a dropped coin, and laid it on the roses, where it snagged on the thorns and hung there, a thin curl of light.

The widow came out with a lamp, saw the cat soaked to the bone and the moon caught in the briars, and laughed until she had to sit on the wall. The moon had only been resting, she said, and the cat had been keeping the light up for us all along. Thimble shook herself, sneezed on the widow's shoe, and went to sit in the hedge. She still goes every night, and so should you, if you want to see the moon come back up.