Tattooed torso in studded rock vest

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A cropped photograph of a woman's torso from the chin down, wearing a black studded vest with a zip front, black leather trousers and studded fingerless gloves. Black and grey tattoos are visible on the shoulder with a leopard-style pattern, the upper arm with a wing or feather design, the chest and the abdomen with a figure or floral design. The lighting is warm and the background is a plain pale wall.

Shoulder Upper arm Chest Other Leopard print Feather Wing Floral

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Calder House could say where the leopard came from, only that it arrived the winter the lifts stopped. Mrs Okafor swore it padded up the stairwell at dusk, its spots going dark against the breeze block, and that it never once looked at the people it passed. It only looked up, towards the roof, the way a dog waits by a door.

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Dessie from flat nine said the cat wanted feathers. He had a carrier bag of them from a pillow he split the week his mother left, and every evening he climbed the stairs and laid a few on the landing. By the second week the leopard had a path of them, grey and brown, running up to the top step. Nobody else thought to ask what they were for.

In March a crow got in through the broken vent and sat on the water tank, complaining about the cold. The leopard went up after it, and the two of them stood there in the wind while the city lit up below. Dessie watched from the stairwell door. He saw the crow lift its wings and not fall, and he understood the feathers had never been for the cat. They had been for the wing, the thing that had been waiting all along to go up.

The next morning the stairwell was swept, the lift still didn't work, and the padlock on the roof door hung open. Dessie went up with his carrier bag, found the top step bare, and sat down to wait for whatever the leopard had left him in exchange.