Shirtless person with black and grey tattoos on the chest and upper arms holding a kitten against their body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tattooed arms holding a kitten

Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless person holds a young grey tabby and white kitten against their chest with both hands. Dark grey tattoos cover the chest and arms, with shading that looks soft in places and bolder linework in others. The kitten's wide eyes are in sharp focus, and the background is softly blurred.

Chest Forearm Upper arm Kitten Cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Oxford Canal could say where the kitten came from, only that it turned up in the coal bunker of the Mary Ellen the week the ice broke. Tom Adair found it wedged behind a sack of sand, grey as wet slate with a white bib, and he fished it out by the scruff and told the lock-keeper it was a tax on his time.

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It rode in his jacket through three locks that morning. By Thrupp it had learned the stove, and by Kidlington it had claimed the coil of rope at the bow as its own, sleeping on it with one paw over its nose like a man guarding a secret. Tom talked to it while he steered. He talked about his brother in Leeds who had not written since Christmas, about the price of diesel, about whether a boat could be called home if you never tied it up for more than a night.

At Heyford the kitten went over the side. Tom saw the splash of white and his heart dropped into his boots, but it was only the cat, paddling back to the towpath with an air of having made its own arrangements. It sat on the bank and washed one ear, watching him with eyes like two chips of sky.

Tom didn't moor that night. He drove on past the ruined mill to the next bridge and sat on the roof until the stars came out, and when the kitten finally climbed aboard again, wet and furious, he wrapped it in his coat and said, to nobody, "Right then. Two of us for Leeds."