Fine line tattoo of a sleeping cat with green, blue and purple watercolour washes on the top of a foot.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour cat on the top of a foot

Fine line · Other · Mixed · Photo

A bare foot rests on a dark surface, with a tattoo of a cat curled up across the top. The cat is drawn in thin black outline and is partly filled with soft green, blue and purple washes that fade out at the edges. The composition is close and angled, with the toes in the foreground and the ankle and dark sleeve at the top of the frame.

Fine line Other Cat Animal Watercolour

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dear Tom,

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The cat has taken to sleeping on the windowsill of the old dye shed, the one with the green door your father never repainted. Mrs Pargeter says it is a witch's cat, but it is only a stray with a torn ear that came in off the forest path the week after the frost. I have called her Sorrel, because of the colour she goes in the evening light, a dull rust that is nearly green where the moss grows over the stones.

You asked in your last letter whether the jays still nest in the beeches above the mill. They do. Yesterday I followed the stream up past the charcoal burners' clearing, the way you used to drag me when we were small, and found the same bramble you tore your coat on. The water had gone the colour of weak tea from the rain, and the light came through the leaves in pale washes, green, then blue, then a sort of violet where the trunks thicken. I sat on the bank with my boots off and thought of you.

Sorrel followed me most of the way back, tail up like a question mark, then curled herself into the bracken by the stile and would not come on. I left her there. When I went back at dusk she was gone, but the bench by the lych gate had a warm patch on it, and a single grey hair was caught on the splinter where you carved our initials.

Write back soon. Mother asks after you every Sunday and pretends she does not.

Yours, Nell