Two neo-traditional tattoos of cats in top hats and bow ties, set in ornate frames, on the calves of two people.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two dressed cats in frames on calves

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

Two side-by-side cat portraits sit in ornate oval frames with fleur-de-lis bases. The cat on the left wears a top hat, a checked waistcoat and a red bow tie, while the cat on the right has blue eyes and wears a hat with a green feather, a red bow and a cameo brooch. The bold outlines, smooth shading and saturated reds, greens and blues are typical of neo-traditional work.

Neo-trad Calf Cat Top hat Bow tie Feather Cameo Fleur-de-lis Frame

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The second frame had gone before Mabel Crouch noticed the gap on the stall, a clean oval of unfaded tin where it had hung beside the gentleman in the top hat. Her husband had priced the pair together at four pounds. A pair is worth more than two singles, he said, and two cats in good waistcoats are worth a crown more again. Mabel had not argued. She had painted the lady herself one wet February, copying a tabby called Dorothy who lived under the stall and ate the tin tacks, and she had given Dorothy blue eyes out of spite towards the vicar's wife, who had blue eyes and had never once bought anything.

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The buyer was a tall woman in a grey coat who paid in coppers and asked nothing about the sitters. Mabel watched her go down the lane with the lady cat held flat against her chest like a hymn book, the red bow catching the light and the cameo brooch knocking gently against the frame. Mabel told herself that was the end of it, and she kept the gentleman out in the rain all week, so that he would not feel the cold of being left alone.

On Saturday a postcard arrived with no name on the back, only a seaside photograph of a mantelpiece in a boarding house. Two oval frames stood on it, one with a top hat, one with a feather, and between them on a doily sat a clock that had stopped at a quarter past four. Mabel pinned the card above the stove where the smoke was worst, set the gentleman's frame back on its nail, straightened his bow tie, and told him the lady was well and had found herself a better hat.