Neo-traditional tattoo of two cats nuzzling inside an oval frame, with purple flowers and teal leaves, on a calf.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two cats and purple flowers on a calf

Neo-trad · Calf · Mixed · Photo

Two cats nuzzle face to face inside a gold oval frame with a scalloped edge, one larger cat and a smaller kitten at its side. Below the frame, three purple flowers with yellow centres sit among teal leaves, all outlined in bold black linework. The cats are shaded in soft greys and the flowers and leaves use bright colour, with the composition filling the calf.

Neo-trad Calf Cat Kitten Flower Leaves Frame Oval frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Dunning had been promised her portrait by Michaelmas, and by the twenty-ninth of September Harriet Coombe had painted everything but the cats. The old tom, Pilcher, would not sit. He walked off the sill whenever she lifted her brush, and the kitten, a grey scrap with a torn ear, would only hold still to wash, so each morning she found a new arrangement of tails and no faces at all.

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She tried a cheaper trick. She borrowed a dead sparrow from the lane, propped it on the sill and dabbed catnip along the ledge. Pilcher came in with his whiskers forward and his mouth open, staring at the window. The kitten only stared at him. Harriet laughed until she had to put the brush down, and when she picked it up again she was painting something she had not planned: the big cat bending low, the small one tipping its chin up to meet him, both with their eyes shut as though the room were warm.

Mrs Dunning came on the Saturday and stood a long time before the easel. "That isn't how they are," she said. Harriet waited for the complaint about the price. Instead Mrs Dunning reached out and touched the wet gold of the frame, the scallops Harriet had gone over three times, and said quietly, "No. That is how they were, with me."

Harriet wrapped the miniature in brown paper that evening and tied it with string. Before she sealed the box she added the purple roses from the hedge along the bottom, the petals rubbed thick with a sable brush, and wrote on the card only: the cats are yours, the flowers are for the wall.