Black and red illustrated design of a dark-haired woman with a black and white cat, a crow and a bare tree, set against ink splatter and brushed black marks.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with black cat and crow design

Mixed · Flash

A dark-haired woman with red paint across her eyes and face sits beside a black and white cat, with a crow perched at the top left and a bare tree at the top right. Black brushed ink and red splatter frame the figure, with the red also forming a vertical band down the right side. The linework is loose and painterly with solid black masses and fine spatter, and the image is a flat drawing with no body part visible.

Woman Cat Crow Tree Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat was waiting on the bonnet of my hire car when I came out of the Blue Anchor, which was the first odd thing about the evening. Pilot belonged to Mrs Oddie, who had died in March, and he had never once sat anywhere without a grudge. Her son had asked me to bring him to the reunion in a wicker basket. Nobody else from the Class of '94 would have bothered.

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Inside, the gym wall was still there under three coats of cream emulsion, though you could see it if the strip lights caught it low. Mr Quayle's red stripe, which he had called a sunset and the head had called vandalism, ran from skirting board to rafters. Dean Penhallow, now a solicitor in Truro, was telling anyone who would listen that it had been Tom Oddie's idea. Tom wasn't there. He had joined the navy the summer after we left and never come back to Cornwall.

A crow had been tapping at the high window all evening. When the DJ played something from 1994 and the room turned to the dance floor, Pilot dropped from the table and sat by the fire door, watching me with his yellow eyes. The crow came down from the sill and walked the length of the hall, stepping over handbags. Outside, the bare sycamore was black against the sodium light, and the crow flew up into it and let fall a small brass tube onto the tarmac, the kind paint came in before we were allowed the squeezy bottles.

I picked it up. Its lid was still crusted red. I went back in, past Dean's laughter, and pressed my palm flat where the stripe was thickest. When I lifted it, the emulsion had gone tacky and my hand came away red to the wrist, the way it had twenty-nine years ago, when nobody would say whose tin it was. Pilot wound round my ankles. I didn't say anything either.