Traditional-style tattoos cover the back of a hand, including a shield and an eight ball, while the hand holds a small ginger kitten.

Traditional hand tattoos holding a kitten

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A tattooed hand cradles a young tabby kitten with its paws resting on the fingers. The back of the hand and wrist are covered in bold, outlined traditional-style designs, including a shield with a banner, an eight ball and lettering across the knuckles. The tattoos are filled with red, green, yellow and grey tones against a dark trouser leg and a grey sleeve.

Traditional Hand Kitten Cat Hand Shield Banner Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The kitten came up the gangway at Gravesend inside a coal sack, and Mr Hollis swore it was the last thing the Brisk Mary needed, a mouth to feed with no rope to earn its keep. We were three days out of the Thames with a hold full of cordage and nothing on the manifest that allowed a cat to sleep in it. Cook wanted it over the side. Hollis wanted it kept, and that ended the argument, because Hollis had never lost one.

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He carried a shield on the back of his hand, a banner unrolling beneath it, and an eight ball a shipmate had pricked in for luck after a card game in Hull. FAMILY ran across the knuckles in letters the salt had softened to blue. He never explained the ball. He only said a man who had been at sea long enough learned to read a hand as a harbour, and the kitten would be safe in one. So each night he lifted the bundle of fur from the bilge store and cupped it in that inked palm, its small paws resting on his fingers like gulls on a rail, and it purred loud enough to hear over the pumps.

The storm came off the Bay in March. Lamps swung, the mainsail split, and two men were nearly lost in the hold. In the worst of it I found Hollis braced at the companion ladder, one arm locked round the rail and the other held out flat, the kitten sitting on it, not moving, eyes as wide as coins. He did not let go of either.

We made Falmouth on the fourth day. The cat walked off first, down the gangway as if it owned the quay, and Hollis watched it go with his palm still curled in the shape of it. Well, he said, that's the only cargo I ever signed for that came back to me. Then he sat down on a bollard and laughed until the dockers stopped to stare.