Two black and white line drawings of sitting cats, one filled with floral vines and the other a solid silhouette dotted with hearts, both wearing collars.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two sitting cats, one floral and one with hearts

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows two sitting cats in profile, both with closed smiling eyes and small heart-shaped noses. The upper cat is drawn in clean outline with its body filled by curling vines, leaves and five-petal flowers. The lower cat is a solid black silhouette with white outlined hearts scattered across its body and tail, and both cats wear a plain collar on a white background.

Botanical Blackwork Cat Flower Vine Leaves Heart Collar Tail Silhouette

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The keeper's wife brought the two cats out to Carrack Skerry in October, in a fish crate lined with oilcloth, the week the gulls went inland for good. The floral one was called Bramble, and she could not sit still without a leaf or a flower curling out from under her, as if the garden had followed her out of the glasshouse in Penzance. The black one had no name at all, only a red ribbon at her throat, and she was content to be looked at and do nothing else.

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My job was keeping them off the lamp room stairs. Bramble went up the iron rungs like a climbing rose, sniffing at the brass, and Sooty sat at the bottom with her eyes shut, smiling the way cats do when they are plotting. Every dusk I wound the clockwork and the great lens began to turn, slow as a church bell, until the beam swept out across the water and found the cod boats coming home. Sooty never once looked up at it. She only watched me.

In November a gale tore the shutter off the north window and the lamp guttered out at three in the morning. I went up with a hurricane lantern and my heart going like a drum, and found the room full of wet wind and Bramble stretched along the cold lens, paws braced, her tail hooked round the spare mantle as if she meant to hold it down. Sooty was not with her. I found her on the bottom step, collar gleaming, looking up at me with the same closed-eyed smile she wore for everything.

We relit the lamp together, my hands shaking, her tail flicking the matchbox. When the beam swung out over Carrack Bay at last, the boats saw it and came in. That night, on the whitewashed wall of the stairwell, the light threw the shapes of two cats: one soft with flowers, one sleek and black and dotted with the small white hearts the glass had caught. I have never been able to tell them apart since, nor have I wanted to.