Our story starts with a bent tail.

Every Bent Tail piece carries the name — and the shape — of a cat who followed one of us everywhere for eighteen years.

Bent Tail is named for Malachai — a black Manx cat born with a naturally bent tail. He showed up as a roommate's cat's housemate and never really left; he followed his person everywhere, like a dog, famously unbothered even the day a squirrel walked up and drank from his water bowl while he lay right beside it. He made a distinctive "meep," like a mallard's call, which earned him the nickname "Murph" — a name that stuck with him for the rest of his life.

Approaching Christmas 2002, all Natalie wanted was Malachai with a bow on his head. On Christmas morning, that's exactly what she got — Malachai wearing a bow, his vet vaccine pamphlet standing in as makeshift "adoption papers." She cried.

Malachai stayed for eighteen years — through roommates, living alone, school, and a wedding. The night Natalie and Tim got married, Tim formally "adopted" Malachai too, with downloaded adoption papers of his own — a moment their friends still joke may have meant more than the wedding itself.

Natalie has an exact replica of Malachai's left front paw print tattooed on her wrist. And his memory is built into the wordmark itself: the curl on the final "l" in "Tail" traces the shape of his own bent tail.

That's the spirit behind everything we print — pieces with character, built to last, made for the people (and the games) you love spending time with.