A stray, on
the record.

Franklin is a real cat. He was found in the middle of the rain at a construction site in the Balkans, scared, hiding under the machinery, with a badly shattered leg he'd carried for weeks.

The people who found him fed him and left, and heard a loud meow follow them home. A neighbour who spoke English warned them the injury looked deep enough that he might not survive it untreated. They took him to a vet, and learned the rest: he was one of only two kittens in his litter to survive, most of the others had been poisoned, and the leg was beyond saving. It was amputated. Franklin became a tripod, and against the odds, he was fine. Sweet, the vet said. Protective, for obvious reasons.

The eight on his face

Franklin is a hachiware, a black-and-white cat whose facial marking looks like the character for the number eight. In Japan, that mark is considered lucky. It is a strange thing to sit with: a cat who was never once lucky, wearing luck on his face. That contradiction is, more or less, the whole feeling of this project.

A cat who was never lucky, wearing luck on his face.

What was actually asked for

His rescuer was explicit, and repeated it several times: they were not asking for money. Not donations, not a fundraiser, just a retweet, and maybe someone who could give him a home. They offered to pay for the vaccinations and the paperwork themselves. All they wanted was to find him people.

We take that seriously, because it would be easy not to. This collection is a tribute, and we are careful about the difference between a tribute and a donation drive:

• The artwork here is our own, a character we drew in his honour, never his real photographs.
• We do not claim to represent Franklin's rescuer, and we are not collecting money on anyone's behalf.
• Franklin's real story ends where the public record ends: last we know, he was still looking for a home. We will not invent a happy ending we can't verify.

Why a cat like this, on a chain like this

Reduced to its mechanism, this project is a small machine that takes value from people trading and quietly hands it to something that can't ask for anything in return, 3,333 cats that just sit there and get fed. When we found that shape, it was impossible not to see Franklin in it. Strangers feeding a stray is the oldest version of the exact thing the contract does automatically.

So the cats you'll meet on the rest of this site, Stray, Fed, Coned, Tripod, and the lucky Hachiware, aren't random flavour. They're the stages of his actual week: still outside, then a bowl appears, then a vet, then three legs, and finally, for a rare few, the number eight.