The art of the feline tattoo

There's a story behind this, a crappy one.

I spent most of the day working on a post I was very proud of. I accidentally discovered the exquisite cats of Japanese painter Kazuaki Horomito in a Facebook video, and quickly copied and embedded it on my blog. Or so I thought.

Then I happened to look at it. Less than half of it had posted. The whole lower half was gone. I was beside myself. I scrambled around to find some actual Horomito, and the internet was full of it. Everyone loves this stuff, and no wonder!  I assembled what I felt was a nice representative sample of his exotically tattooed cats, but then I thought I'd better take another shot at posting the video.

Jesus H. Christ. The whole thing disappeared! The entire post that I had worked on so painstakingly all day, making sure all the photos were the right size, etc., - down the fucking toilet.

Normally there's automatic backup when this happens. But this time, nothing. Just nothing at all. Since I am so stupidly committed to my useless work that nobody sees anyway, I scrambled around on YouTube and found an absolutely wonderful slideshow of Horomito, but it was set to the inane kiddie song, The Cat Came Back. No, I am not kidding! "Gimme a meow. Say, MEOWWWW!" I had prayed I would never hear that monstrosity again once my children were potty-trained.

 And the artist's name was spelled Horotimo.

So I ended up with this, inadequate, but at least an introduction to the images, which I was just about to delete out of my recycle bin forever.

Strangely enough, I keep thinking about The Waltzing Cat by Leroy Anderson, a better fit (for the cats are surely whimsical, just not sickeningly coy and cutesie). So listen to this while you're looking at them.