A small solid black silhouette of a walking cat with a raised tail, tattooed on the inner forearm near the wrist.

Walking cat silhouette on a forearm

Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A small, solid black silhouette of a cat walking to the left, with its head turned slightly and its tail curled upward. The shape is filled with black ink with no visible linework or shading, and the design is shown in a single colour. It sits on the inner forearm close to the wrist against a dark grey top and a pale background.

Forearm Cat Silhouette Tail

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ptolemaios the potter had been told twice to keep the cat out of the kiln room, so when Thaïs came in with soot on her cheeks and said the animal was out again, he only grunted and kept turning the wheel. The clay under his thumbs had gone thin and grey. Outside, the late sun came low over the harbour wall and threw every shape in the street into long black strips.

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The cat was walking the length of the wall as if it owned the stones, head turned back once toward the open door, tail lifted into a question mark. Thaïs said it always walked that way when it wanted to be followed. Ptolemaios wiped his hands, took a stick of charcoal from the shelf, and went out after it. He had never drawn anything for pleasure in his life. He traced the cat's outline on a flat shard of broken amphora, pressing hard, and the line came easily because the animal stopped every few steps to let him catch up.

When he finished, the shard showed a black cat walking left, one foreleg lifted, the tail curled up like a hook. Thaïs held it against the wall and laughed. "It looks like it is leaving," she said. "It is only going to the fish market," he said, though he was not sure. By the time he looked up, the cat had already gone round the corner.

Years later the shard sat on a shelf above the wheel, blacker now from the kiln smoke, and every customer who asked about it got the same answer: that is the cat's shadow, and the cat is still out there somewhere, walking away with its tail up.