Small black and grey tattoo of an upside-down cat with legs raised and tail hanging, placed on the forearm below a lace sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Upside-down cat on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small cat is shown upside down, with its legs stretched upwards and its tail hanging down. The shading is soft and greyish, with the darkest tones on the tail and the ears and face. The cat sits alone on a pale arm beside a white lace dress against a plain grey background.

Realism Forearm Cat Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grey cat came down the Skerrow quay every morning with her legs in the air, and nobody in the harbour town ever saw her land the right way up. We called her Mrs Penhallow, after the chandler's widow she seemed to think was her friend. She hooked her back claws over the rigging of the Marjorie Ann and hung there, tail swinging like a plumb line, while the gulls squabbled over the fish heads below.

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I mended nets on the slip opposite, and for three summers I told her she would crack her skull on the cobbles. She didn't care. Her view, she let me understand, was the only sensible one: the sky was a floor, the masts ran down into the water, and everything that mattered sat on the far side of the bay where the ferry lights came on. The ferrymen swore she was waiting for someone to come back across it.

The winter the Ellery boat went out and did not return, the cat stopped hanging from the rigging. She sat on the bollard at the end of the pier, paws tucked under, facing the fog. I brought her a herring and she ignored it. On the third night the wind turned and the fog tore open in one long strip, and there, low on the black water, a red light bobbed upside down in its own reflection.

It was only a buoy, and I felt a fool for hoping. But Mrs Penhallow leapt from the bollard, hung by her hind claws from the iron ring, and yowled until the lifeboat men came running down the quay. They found the Ellery crew clinging to the upturned hull of a dinghy, and the cat, who had seen them first, was the only one of us who had been looking the wrong way up.