Watercolour-style tattoo of a black cat head with a yellow eye and fine whiskers, with blue and red ink washes, on the side of a torso over the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour black cat on the ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A black cat's head in profile, with a yellow eye and long, fine whisker lines that trail off the design. The head is solid black shading, while blue and red-orange ink runs down below it in loose, splattered washes. The design sits on the side of the torso, with the cat's head at the upper edge and the colour fading away towards the lower part of the image.

Ribs Cat Cat head Whiskers Eye Watercolour splash

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The frost has got into the water trough again, and you are breaking it with the heel of a hammer when the black cat comes across the yard as if it owns the place, which, as far as the ewes are concerned, it does. Nobody on Hallam Farm has ever claimed her. Mrs Ottley calls her Smudge because she walks through the wet paint in the lambing shed and leaves prints on everything.

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The blue is from the dye tub Ottley used for the fleeces before the mill closed; the red is rust off the gate that the thaw brings down in orange runs. You have been meaning to scrub the shed floor for a week. This morning the cat sits on the stone sill of the barn door and does not move, her yellow eye fixed on the hay loft, her whiskers stiff with cold, as though she is waiting for you to be as patient as she is.

Up in the loft, in the dark behind the bales, a ewe has wedged herself between two pallets and is bleating low and steady. You kneel in the straw with your sleeves rolled and your breath going up in clouds, and the cat comes up the ladder ahead of you, quick and sure-footed, and settles on the beam above the lamp.

By the time the lamb is breathing and wet and furious in the straw, the light through the slats has turned the colour of a bruised plum. Ottley comes up the ladder with two mugs of tea and stops, staring at the cat. "She always knows," he says. You do not ask what she knows. You just watch her blink slowly at the new lamb, and think the shed floor can wait another week.