Colour tattoo on a person's upper back showing two seated cats, one black and white and one calico, framed by green vines with red and blue flowers.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two cats and floral vines on the back

Botanical · Back · Mixed · Photo

The design shows two seated cats, one black and white and one orange, black and white, facing in slightly different directions. They sit within a circular wreath of green swirling vines and small red and blue flowers. The linework is dark and clean, with flat areas of black and orange and soft green foliage, and the composition is centred on the back.

Botanical Back Cat Vine Swirl Flower Wreath

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The Halcyon Vane had two cats on her books and one cook who pretended to hate them. Dessie swore Ginger was the worse of the pair, a bad-tempered calico who sat on the flour sacks and hissed at anyone reaching for the sugar. Bramble, the black and white tom, was soft in the way that gets a man into trouble. He sat by the range each evening with his paws tucked under him, watching the cook stir with the same patient face he kept for the bosun.

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Dessie grew nasturtiums and cornflowers in tins along the galley porthole, the seeds bought from a stall in Lisbon for two escudos and a promise to keep them alive. By August the bean vines had climbed the stays and curled back on themselves, green as bottle glass, and the cats took to sitting inside the loop they made. Ginger faced the stove. Bramble faced the door. Between them they kept the whole ship in order, or so the cook told the purser, who did not argue.

The night off Finisterre the sea came over the bow and the galley door burst inward. Pans crashed from their hooks. Dessie went down hard against the range and lay still with blood in her hair, and the cats were the only ones who moved at once. Ginger dragged a blanket off the bench and pushed it under the cook's head. Bramble sat on her chest and yowled until the second mate came down with a lamp.

She lived. At Falmouth she went ashore with her sea bag and a stitched scalp, and the cats stayed aboard for the next voyage as if no one had asked them. Years later the log still lists them: two cats, one galley, vines in good health. Nobody wrote down that the pressed nasturtiums in the back of that book came from the tins by the porthole, or that the two cats had been first to reach her.