Black tribal-style stencil of a stylised cat running vertically, with a long curling tail at the top and a angular face near the base, shown on a plain white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Vertical tribal cat design

Black and grey · Flash

A bold black tribal-style drawing of a stylised cat arranged vertically, with a long tapering tail curling up at the top and a body of heavy, flowing shapes. A face with angular eyes and a patterned muzzle sits in the lower half above the paws. The design uses solid black linework and negative space on a plain white background, with no shading or colour.

Cat Tail Paw Face Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The grain was short again, a basket here and a basket there, and the steward Hetu swore it was the scribes' fault while the scribes swore it was the rats. Hetu set a trap of salted fish and sat up with a lamp. Nothing came for three nights. On the fourth the lamp guttered, and something long and pale came down the wall of the granary like a thread of smoke.

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It was a cat, though not one Hetu had seen before. Its tail rose from its back in a single hard curl, and its body was marked in heavy black bands, like the shadow of a reed fence laid over it. It did not touch the fish. It walked the length of the sacks, stopping at each one, and looked at Hetu over its shoulder with eyes cut at the corners like a sickle moon.

Hetu followed it down the track to the river, where a reed boat sat grounded in the mud. Beneath its keel lay a sack of barley wrapped in matting, and beside the sack a man's sandal, its strap still knotted. The cat sat on the sack and washed one paw, unhurried, as though it had been waiting for someone to notice. Hetu saw then whose name was cut into the leather, and that the scribe who had sworn loudest about the rats was the one carrying the grain away.

Hetu said nothing to the magistrate. He moved his lamp to the steward's post and counted the sacks by hand every morning, and the numbers came out whole. The cat still came each night and walked its slow line along the sacks, and Hetu let it, because a tail that curled so high was not a thing that could be bought off with fish.