Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with cat head in profile on forearm

Fine line · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a woman's profile facing right, with her head replaced by a cat's head with pointed ears, whiskers and a detailed eye. The hair is drawn in fine hatched lines around a bun, while the cat's face uses dense stippled shading. The neckline and shoulder are rendered in a fine outline with a dotted pattern, all in black ink on a forearm against a plain, softly lit background.

Fine line Dotwork Forearm Woman Cat Profile Hair bun Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Pruett wanted her likeness cut in black paper before the Whitby regatta, and she wanted it the way she had been painted in her youth, hair up and chin lifted like a figurehead. I have cut silhouettes on the front room table at number nine Bridge Street for twenty-two years, and I had never once had a sitter arrive with a cat under her arm. Tibs had been left with me while her nephew fetched the carriage, and he had hopped onto the stool before anyone could stop him.

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I pinned the paper to the board and took up my scissors, and the cat turned his head so neatly to the left that the lamplight caught every whisker. Mrs Pruett had forgotten her spectacles and could not see the fault. I could. Each time I lifted the blade, the outline came out with pointed ears where the bun should have been, and the throat I had meant for her came out furred. I pricked the lace collar with a needle, as my mother taught me, a row of tiny holes to stand for the net her mother once knotted for the fishermen's wives, and I decided the sheet was ruined.

The nephew came back early. Mrs Pruett saw the paper on the table and went very still. She carried it to the window and held it up against the grey sea. The cat's profile looked out over the harbour as if he had been waiting for a boat for years. 'That's Tibs,' she said, 'and that's me,' and then she laughed until she had to sit down on the step.

I still have the sheet. It hangs above my kitchen table, and when the boats come in at dusk the light passes through the pricked holes and falls across the wall in dots. Tibs died in the spring. Some evenings I swear the cut cat is still watching the water, bun and all, waiting for someone to come home.