Three vintage-style cat designs on a woman's shoulder and upper arm, including a cat in a pink hat and a banner reading CAT LADY.

Three vintage cats on an upper arm

Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The image shows three illustrated cat designs on a woman's shoulder and upper arm, with a banner reading CAT LADY beneath the lower cat. The designs resemble Victorian-era chromolithograph illustrations, with soft outlines and shaded fur, and they appear to be temporary transfers rather than permanent ink. The palette is muted, with pinks, browns and tans, and the design is set against a plain pale background and a white lace top.

Upper arm Shoulder Cat Hat Bow Collar Banner

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The third stone had to be wiped again before Mr Pell would let the proof leave the shop. Ink had bled into the tabby's ruff, a smear of rose where the bow should have been crisp, and he held the sheet up to the gas jet and sighed the way he did when a thing refused to behave. Nell stood at the press with her sleeves rolled and waited. She had cut the transfer blocks herself that winter, one for each cat, and she knew every whisker by heart.

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The commission came from a soap works in Bermondsey that wanted a trade card for its Christmas stock: three cats, each dressed as a lady of quality, with a banner across the foot to say whose they were. Nell had drawn the hatted one from memory of her aunt's tabby, who had once sat on a bonnet at Margate and refused to be moved. The grey one with the collar was her own cat, Duchess, who had never in her life been shown a bow she didn't try to eat. The big striped cat at the bottom was Mr Pell's idea, a pompous fellow with ears like a sentry, and he insisted on the wording himself.

On the last morning the foreman wanted the banner changed to something more dignified, but Nell had a different thought. She carried the finished sheet to the window and stood where the grey light came through the frosted glass, so the three faces caught it properly. Then she took up a pencil and wrote, very small, in the margin where the trimmers would cut it away, the name of the street she was born in. Beneath it she added, Duchess, aged four, who does not approve.