Close crop of a woman in a red dress holding a white cat skeleton, with dark tattoos on her forearms and a flower design on the back of her hand.

Tattooed forearms holding a cat skeleton

Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A woman in a red dress with a white collar holds a white cat skeleton in front of her body, with the face and head cropped out of frame. Her forearms and the back of one hand carry dark tattoos, including a floral design on the hand and a banner with lettering on the right forearm. The photograph is well lit against a leopard print sofa, and the tattoos appear mostly black and grey with some red tones.

Forearm Upper arm Hand Skeleton Flower Rose Lettering Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ottoline Rudd had paid for the cat skeleton in coins, and the man at the house clearance swore it had come from a Victorian surgeon's cellar. Hester Vane, who restored old bones from a back room above a shoe repairer's in Whitby, didn't believe him, but the price was right and the bones were very fine, so she carried the biscuit tin home under her arm.

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She wired each vertebra with thread the colour of old piano keys, working under a lamp with a green shade. The ribs were the hard part. One had been glued on crooked by someone who loved the cat more than they loved their craft, and when she eased it free a scrap of paper fell from the hollow beneath. It was folded small and written in pencil: 'Tibbs, who waited on the sill for the fishing boats. Come home, come home.'

Hester did not know any Tibbs. She knew the sill, though, the one above the harbour where gulls argued at first light. Over the following week she finished the legs, pinned the skull to its brass stand, and every morning she carried the skeleton to the window and set it facing the water.

On the eighth morning a boat came in on the tide, and a grey tabby sat on the harbour wall below, watching the bones through the glass. Hester eased the sash open. The cat did not come in. It looked at the skeleton, then at her, then trotted off along the wall towards the lane, as if it had only come to check the address. Hester left the window open anyway.