Black and grey tattoo of two cats curled together in a circle among blackberry branches, leaves and flowers, on the upper arm.

Two curled cats with blackberry branch on upper arm

Botanical · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

Two cats curl around each other in a rounded, yin-yang style arrangement, one pale and one dark, with the shading built from fine stippling and hatched lines. A blackberry branch with leaves, berries and a flower wraps around the figures from top to bottom, all in black ink and grey tones. The composition is centred and vertical, filling most of the upper arm with a vintage engraving feel.

Botanical Upper arm Cat Blackberry Leaves Berry Flower Branch

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have stamped four hundred passports since the bramble came over the fence, and still your eyes go to the hedge before the queue. At Halfpenny Bridge the crossing is no more than a striped barrier, a sentry box with a kettle that only boils on the far side of noon, and a strip of tarmac that runs down to the brown river. The hedge grows on both banks, so the blackberries ripen on both sides at once, and the pickers from either town cross to fill their pails and never once ask whose bush it is.

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Two cats have taken the bridge rail as their own. The pale one belongs to the postmistress on your side, who calls her Mab and feeds her sardines from a saucer. The dark one belongs to the miller's widow across the water, and nobody has ever given it a name in your hearing. Every dusk they meet at the centre of the barrier, where the white paint is worn, and they curl into one another so tightly that from a distance the crossing looks like a single round stone. A drover's boy once tried to shift them with his crook. You told him the road was wide enough for cats and cattle both, and he went red and walked his flock around.

Then the memo came from the capital. Live animals must be declared, inspected and held. You were told to separate them by the end of the week. On Friday you walked out with the form on a clipboard and found the dark cat asleep with a blackberry leaf caught in its fur, the pale cat's tail draped across its face. You stood there long enough for the lorry driver to sound his horn twice.

On the form you wrote No goods to declare. Then, in the box for remarks, you wrote Two travellers, both in order, and stamped it with a thumb still stained purple from the hedge. In the morning the barrier lifted for the first lorry, and the cats had not moved an inch from the middle of the road.