Pencil and wash drawing of a white cat and a black cat curled together to form a yin yang circle on plain paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Yin yang with black and white cats

Black and grey · Flash

A white cat and a black cat curl around each other inside a circle, forming a yin yang symbol. The linework is soft and sketchy, with the fur shaded in grey wash and graphite on a white background. The white cat sits on the left and the black cat on the right, with the composition centred and the edges of the circle left loosely drawn.

Yin yang Cat Black cat Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rats had eaten half the millet before the magistrate remembered he owned a granary, so the clerk sent me down to the river quarter to buy cats. I am a poor man with a sharp eye for a bargain, and I came back with two that the seller swore were brothers. One was soot-black from ears to tail. The other was white as a bleached bone, and the two could not be parted. Tie one in a sack and the other sat at the mouth of it, yowling until the knot was loosened.

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I tried for three nights to set them against the rats. The cats ignored the rats entirely. Each dawn I found them asleep on the highest sack, the white one curled with its nose tucked under the black one's tail, the black one's chin resting on the white one's flank, so that the pair made a single round loaf of fur. The rats crept along the beams above them and went back the way they came, because there was no gap in that circle for a rat to slip through.

The clerk swore at me, then at the cats, then at the rats, and docked my wages for the lost millet. I told him a granary is only as sound as its guards, and that I had been given two animals who would not be divided. He did not laugh. He climbed the ladder himself with a bamboo stick, meaning to shake them loose.

He came down without the stick. The cats had not stirred, but the white one had opened one eye at him, then closed it again, and the black one had turned its head so the two faces lay side by side on the sacks like a pair of folded fans. The clerk stood under the beams for a long time. Then he took his tally board and wrote the millet down as whole, and he never asked me about my wages again.