Black ink tattoo of two cat silhouettes on the ankle, with their tails curling together to form an outlined heart.

Two black cats with a heart tail on ankle

Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

Two solid black cat silhouettes sit close together, one slightly higher than the other, on the side of a lower leg near the ankle. Their tails loop down and meet to form a thin outlined heart. The cats are filled in with solid black ink, while the heart and tails are drawn in a fine single line, and the image is a close, well-lit photo against a red fabric background.

Ankle Cat Heart Tail Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The two black cats had slept on the same warm pipe for nine years when the hull of the Marrow Gale began to sing, and the people of the lower decks knew it meant the long cold was coming back up through the ice.

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Their names were Sook and Tallow, and nobody aboard could say which of them had come first. Sook was the older, sitting a little higher on the pipe and always watching the vents. Tallow slept with his tail hooked round her hind leg, so that when the ship turned in its slow orbit, both tails curled together and made a shape the children drew on the walls with soot: a heart, thin as a thread, closed at the bottom where the tips met.

When the pumps failed in the third winter, the captain, a woman called Oona Vesey, ordered the lower decks sealed. Families carried their bread up to the galley. Nobody thought to carry the cats. Sook went down the ladder in the dark on the sixth night, and Tallow followed her without being asked, the way he always had. They were found at dawn in the boiler room, curled on the warm plates, their tails knotted so tight that nobody could part them.

After the pumps were mended, Oona had the soot heart painted onto the hatch above the boiler room, and the children were taught the rule that came with it: whoever goes down after the warm things goes together, or not at all. Some say the ship still sings in the cold months, and that if you lay your palm on that hatch you feel two small weights settle against it, one a little higher than the other.