Three simple black line drawings of cats in different poses on a white background, shown as tattoo flash designs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three line drawings of cats

Black and grey · Flash

Three separate black line drawings of cats are stacked vertically on a white background. The top cat sits upright with a bushy tail, one section of which is filled in solid black, the middle cat stands with a raised fluffy tail, and the bottom cat curls up low with its eyes closed. The linework is continuous and uniform with minimal shading, and whiskers are drawn as short strokes.

Cat Line drawing Whiskers Tail Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mr Pell handed me the good pen on a wet Tuesday and told me to stop wasting ink on the cat that lived under the bakery step. It was a grey tom with a tail like a fox's brush, and he would not sit still for anyone in Hallam Row. I had been sketching him on the backs of old invoices for a month, and he had never once looked at me for long enough to be drawn properly.

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So I took my pad to the sill where he slept and waited. He came out at dinner time and sat upright with his back to the wind, his tail curling round the paving like a question mark. I drew the sitting shape first, because it was the one I could hold in my head. Then he rose, stretched, and walked off, and I had to chase the line of his back with my wrist while the bakery girl laughed at me through the glass. Pell said the trick was to draw the whole animal in one breath, never lifting the pen, or the cat would come out in pieces.

By evening I had three cats on a sheet: one sitting, one standing, and one curled low like a loaf. The tom had gone under the step to sleep, so I finished the last drawing from memory and closed its eyes with a single stroke. Pell pinned the sheet in the window beside the sale tins, and a woman stopped to point at the sleeping one and said it was the only cat in Hallam Row that had ever kept still for her.

The next morning the step was empty and the sheet was still in the window, and I found I did not mind so much. A thing drawn in one breath stays exactly where you left it.