Colour tattoo of a white cat with black markings curled on a crescent, beneath a katana, with teal flames and pink petals, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

White cat with katana on a forearm

Neo-trad · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A white cat with black markings curls around a crescent shape, with a katana with a red-wrapped hilt lying across the top. Teal and blue flowing lines run behind the cat, and pink petal shapes are scattered across the skin. Bold black outlines frame the figures, with soft shading on the cat and the teal flames, and colour ink dominates the composition.

Neo-trad Japanese Forearm Cat Sword Petal Flame Crescent moon

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot kept the sword in the cold room behind the bell rope, wrapped in red cord, and every night for nine winters I slept curled across its hilt. Brother Anselm said a cat was no fit guardian for a blade, but the mice in the scriptorium had never once troubled the copies of the sutras, and no one had tried to steal anything since I arrived. That, I think, is the best a guardian can hope for.

Keep reading

The ronin who left it came up the mountain road in the week the cherries broke, bleeding from the shoulder and asking only for rice and a warm floor. He died on the third night with petals drifting through the gap in the shutters. Before the light went he knotted the red cord round the hilt and made Anselm promise the blade would be drawn only for the blue fire that rose off the lake, never for a quarrel.

The autumn I turned nine, Keita from the fishing village came up at the dark of the moon with his mother's lantern and a face full of fear. His brother had gone out on the water and not come back, and the blue fire was rising off the reeds again. He wanted the sword. I looked at him for a long time, then walked ahead of him down the path, because a cat knows when a thing has already decided to be carried.

At the water's edge I did not let him draw it. The cord slipped loose in my teeth and the blade rang once against the stones, and the flames bent away from the sound like grass in wind. Keita's brother was sitting in a boat under the crescent moon, laughing at nothing, and when we pulled him ashore the lake was only water again. Anselm later found the sword back in its silk, the cord tied in a neat red bow, and a single pink petal laid across the hilt, which he said was the ronin's way of saying thank you.