Pencil and ink tattoo design of three sphynx cats stacked above a crescent moon, with flame-like lines behind them, drawn on paper in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Three sphynx cats with a crescent moon

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A line drawing of three hairless sphynx cats, one above another, with a crescent moon at the top right and sweeping flame or smoke shapes behind the figures. Bold black outlines are combined with pencil stippling and light shading on the bodies and background shapes. The drawing is in black and grey on pale paper, with a pen and a pencil lying across the lower right of the frame.

Neo-trad Cat Sphynx cat Crescent moon Flame Moon

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The carter's wife had been told to keep her lamp unlit on the Gallow Pass after dark, and she did not, because her husband was still somewhere above the snowline with the salt. So she lit it, and the wind laid the flame flat along the wall, and that was how she saw the first of the cats.

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It was bare as a plucked hen and grey-pink as a boiled egg, and it sat on the cairn with its ears turned towards her like two open hands. Behind it, low over the ridge, the new moon hung thin as a paring. Then a second cat came down the scree, and a third, and they stacked themselves on the great flat stone one above another, the way cats do when they want a better view of something they do not intend to chase.

The old men at the inn at Cwm Dun said these were the Three Hushers, sent up from the warm valley when the first mine collapsed and nobody came to dig out the men. They did not hunt. They walked ahead of travellers and kept the fires where they belonged, and they took back the sparks that blew up from the forge chimneys so the pass would not burn. Nobody believed it until the carter's wife watched the middle one lick a streak of flame off its own flank and blow it out over the gorge like a candle.

She waited until dawn. Her husband came over the top at first light, coughing, with the salt intact and his hair singed to the scalp. He said the cats had walked him down out of the snow, one ahead, one behind, one on his shoulder, and that he had not once been cold. She asked where they had gone. He pointed at the cairn, where three small grey dents sat in the frost side by side, and the moon was still up, pale as a coin left out in the sun.