Wow! This mother-cat, and her kitten are astonishingly beautiful!
Just as a tangent: my girlfriend and I rescued an emaciated, and starving female cat from the back alley three years ago.
After we took her in, and began feeding her lots of food, so she could regain her weight/strength, it became quickly obvious that she was pregnant.
She ended up giving birth to 3 extremely cute/healthy/vibrant squirming kittens.
A lot of our friends said they would take the kittens... but when it came time for us to give them away, our friends got cold feet, unfortunately.
So we just ended up keeping the entire family together (mother and 3 kittens).
The kittens are now full grown of course (3 years later), and the 2 male brothers are HUGE and muscular, especially compared to their Mom, who is much smaller, and less stronger than them.
One of them is so muscular and tough looking, we named him "Hercules". (But despite his appearance, he's extremely gentle. He also sleeps almost constantly: about 20 hours per day! I've never in my life seen a young cat that sleeps so much.)
Anyways... despite their huge size advantage over their Mom, they are nevertheless still highly submissive to her, to this day, as if they were still small kittens.
The mother cat still hugs them like this photo, and often falls asleep hugging one of her "babies".
So this photo reminds me so much of our Mother cat, with her kittens.
Funny enough, she also still forcefully pins them down to this very day, and cleans them from head to tail, while they squirm.
Also, sometimes when they are fighting with each other, she actually breaks up the fight, and whacks them in the face with her paw!
Whenever she does that to them, they immediately crouch down on the floor, and roll over in a submissive gesture, showing her their belly, and raising one paw in the air (to submit).
Also interestingly, 2 of the kittens actually breast-fed from their mother twice per day, until they were 9 months old!
All of this causes me to wonder, if perhaps we take kittens away from their mother too early. Obviously 9 months is too long for a kitten to breast feed... but I found it interesting to see how long the bond between Mother and her kittens lasts.