Ink and colour drawing of a three-headed black cat with yellow eyes, seated beneath a hatched crescent moon and a small cross.

Three-headed black cat under a crescent moon

Mixed · Flash

A seated black cat with three heads, each with open jaws and several yellow eyes, is drawn in fine ink with soft grey shading. A crescent moon with fine hatching sits behind the heads, and a small cross is drawn above it. Yellow eyes and pink mouths are the only colour against the black and grey.

Cat Crescent moon Cross Fangs

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat arrived on the first night of the dark moon, wet through and sitting on the landing as if it had booked the room. Three heads turned to me at once. I counted eyes out of habit, the way my father taught me to count the lamps: six of them, gold as the brass rail, and all of them on me.

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I kept the light alone on Skerrow that winter, with only the boatman's fortnightly visits and the gulls for company. The cat ate the mackerel I was saving for myself and never once asked permission. At night the middle head sang, low, and the two outer heads argued over the tune in a language I half knew from the Gaelic my mother spoke when she was angry. I wrote it all in the log under 'weather, nil', because nobody reads that column closely.

Then in February the moon thinned to a bright blade behind the cat's shoulders, and the cross I had scratched above the lamp room door began to glow a dull green. The middle head told me, very plainly, that the relief boat would not come. The left head yawned and showed me its teeth. The right head only watched the sea, and I understood that it was watching for something to come out of it.

On the thirteenth night a shape rose beyond the reef, pale and patient, and the cat stood and stretched all three necks towards it. I climbed the stairs, lit the great lamp and turned it full on the water. When I looked back the cat was curled on the stool, purring with every mouth, and the sea had gone as quiet as a shut book. The relief boat came on the Tuesday. I never wrote down what I saw.