Side by side, a photo of a grey Persian cat and a colour traditional tattoo of a cat in a top hat, monocle and bow tie with hibiscus flowers and a banner reading You Sir Are The Cat's Meow.

Top hat cat tattoo beside a cat photo

Traditional · Colour · Photo

The left panel is a photograph of a grey and cream Persian cat. The right panel shows a colour tattoo of the same cat wearing a black top hat with a red band, a monocle, a red bow tie and a blue jacket, holding a pipe, with orange hibiscus flowers and green leaves around it. The bold black outlines and solid fills give it a classic, graphic look, and the banner below carries the words You Sir Are The Cat's Meow.

Traditional Cat Top hat Monocle Bow tie Pipe Hibiscus Flower Banner Lettering Portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ottoline Vane had been promised a judge for the marrow and dahlia section by half past two, so when a grey Persian came up the vicarage path at a quarter past, with a silver monocle hooked over one eye and a briar pipe clamped unlit in his jaw, she assumed he was the vicar's nephew in a costume. He walked the length of the trestle tables without a flicker of interest in the marrows. He sniffed the dahlias and dismissed them with a single twitch of his whiskers. Then he stopped in front of a jam jar on the end of the row, where the curate had set one orange hibiscus flower in a little water, and he sat down in front of it as though it were the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

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The curate, who had been hoping no one would look closely at his entry, went pink to the ears. Mrs Vane tried to shoo the cat away with a rolled programme, but he only raised a paw and blinked at her through the glass of his monocle, a look so dry it might have been sherry. She gave up, found a red rosette in the tombola box, and pinned it to the jar herself. The cat lowered his head, pleased, and went to sleep in a patch of sun beside the teapot.

By four o'clock the story had reached the Women's Institute, the church hall and the pub, and nobody could say for certain whether the judge had been a visitor, a stray or the curate's idea of a joke. The curate's jar stayed on the end of the row until the tombola prizes were handed out. Mrs Vane wrote the card for it herself, in capital letters, and then sat looking at it for a long moment before adding a line underneath in smaller writing, because the cat had clearly earned it: best in show, and the cat's meow.