Colour traditional-style tattoo of a grey tabby and an orange cat curled together inside a circle on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two cats curled in a circle on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A grey tabby cat and an orange cat curl around each other inside a black outlined circle, in a yin and yang style arrangement. The bold black linework is even, with flat orange, pink and green fills and grey shading along the tabby's striped fur and tail. The circular design sits centrally on the upper arm, with another tattoo of green foliage and a few outlined rings visible at the edge of the frame.

Traditional Japanese Upper arm Cat Tabby cat Yin yang Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The granary at Hu Bridge held forty thousand measures of millet, and my task as clerk was to count every sack twice, once by weight and once by the cats. Smoke, the grey tabby, was born in the north wall and believed the whole store belonged to him. Lantern, the orange one, arrived in the autumn rains with a torn ear and no intention of leaving. They fought over the same crack in the threshold for a month before the first frost.

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The cold came early that year. One night I found them asleep in the straw by the brazier, Smoke curled round Lantern's back and Lantern's tail tucked over Smoke's nose, the two of them so tight they made a single loop of fur. By morning they had worked out a rule without any help from me. Whoever lay outermost took the stiffest draught, and at dusk they swapped, nose to tail, each turning the warm middle over to the other like a potter turning a wheel.

In the second winter the magistrate's inspector came with his ledger and his bad temper. He counted the sacks, found six short, and said the cats had eaten the difference. He ordered them thrown in the river sack by sack, and me with them if the count did not match. I stood at the threshold with my brush wet and my heart louder than the wind.

I did not lie. I simply wrote the missing millet down as spilled in the flood, which it had been, and drew beside the total a small ring of ink, two halves nose to tail. The inspector squinted at it, sniffed, and signed. The cats were asleep on the sacks when he left, and the ring is still there in the ledger, which no one has ever thought to read.