Black tribal-style cat with a striped, curled tail tattooed on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal cat with striped tail on upper back

Blackwork · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised cat in bold black outline walks down the skin with its tail curling upwards and ending in a striped tip. The linework is thick and uniform, with solid black stripes on the body and tail and a spiral detail where the tail curls. The image is in black ink only, shown in a close, slightly angled photograph of bare skin.

Blackwork Back Cat Tail Stripe Spiral Tribal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbey cat came to us in the hungry spring the river froze, a thin striped thing with a tail curled like a question mark, and Brother Anselm said she had walked up the lane from the mill as though she had been sent to inspect us. Within a week the mice that had gnawed our vellum for a generation had gone quiet, and she had claimed the scriptorium as her own.

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She would sit on the lectern beside Brother Oswin's ink pots and watch his quill. When he dipped it she would lay one paw on the page and look up at him as if he had spelled a word wrong. He learned to leave a margin for her, and she learned to keep her paw inside it.

In autumn the Abbot asked us to copy the old chronicle before the damp finished it. Oswin worked the initial letters in spirals, and the cat would curl her tail around each one until the ink dried, the way she curled around the warm flue on cold nights. Oswin said the spiral was her signature. I said it was simply a cat wanting the ink.

When Oswin died at Candlemas, the chronicle was found finished, every margin wearing a small striped tail. The cat slipped out through the gap in the wall that night and did not come back. Brother Anselm swears she still sits on the mill step, waiting for someone to ask where she has been. I have never asked. I leave the scriptorium window open a crack.