Black fine line tattoo of two cats sitting side by side on a horizontal line, with curled tails, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Two cats sitting on a line

Fine line · Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two simple cat silhouettes sitting side by side on a horizontal line, with one tail curling down below the line and the other curling up behind the second cat. The linework is thin, even and solid black, with no shading. The design is small and sits on the skin of the upper back, with a blue lace top visible at the edge of the frame.

Fine line Back Cat Line art Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Hallam farm could say which of the two cats had come first, only that by the first hard frost they were never apart. The grey one was called Pennock and the thin black one Sal, and they took the wire strung between the barn and the apple store as their own, sitting on it side by side like men waiting for a bus that never stopped.

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Snow came early that year and stayed. The farmer's daughter, Nell, went out each morning with a bucket of skimmed milk and found the pair exactly where she had left them, tails hanging down on either side of the line, watching the lane. She thought they were only being lazy until the morning the lane filled to the gateposts and the milk cart could not get through, and the cats were gone from the wire.

She found them in the hay loft of the lower field, where Sal had dragged an old horse blanket over a crate of kittens and Pennock sat guard with his tail curled up behind him like a question. Nell had never much liked cats. She carried the kittens up to the house one at a time in her apron, and the mother followed her every step, and when she set them down by the range the old man said nothing at all, which from him was a blessing.

By spring the wire had sagged under the thaw, but the two cats were back on it, each with a kitten pressed into the crook of its tail. The farm kept them all. Nell still tells it that the milk bucket went out every morning after that, and that nobody ever again needed to ask where the cats were waiting.