The theory in this paper was motivated by an example of an inverse semigroup important in Girard's 'Geometry of interaction' programme for linear logic. At one level, the theory is a refinement of the Wagner-Preston representation theorem: we show that every inverse semigroup is isomorphic to an inverse semigroup of all partial symmetries (of a specific type) of some structure. At another level, the theory unifies and completes two classical theories: the theory of bisimple inverse monoids created by Clifford and subsequently generalised to all inverse monoids by Leech; and the theory of 0-bisimple inverse semigroups due to Reilly and McAlister. Leech showed that inverse monoids could be described by means of a class of right cancellative categories, whereas Reilly and McAlister showed that 0-bisimple inverse semigroups could be described by means of generalised RP-systems. In this paper, we prove that every inverse semigroup can be constructed from a category acting on a set satisfying what we term the 'orbit condition'.