Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a smiling cat wearing round glasses, a ribbed beanie and a striped jumper, on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Bespectacled cat in a beanie and jumper

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cartoon cat with round spectacles, a ribbed knit beanie and a striped high-neck jumper, with whiskers and ears framing the head. The face and knitwear are built from fine stippled dots and shading, with bolder black outlines defining the glasses and features. The design is rendered entirely in black and grey ink and sits centrally on a forearm against a plain background.

Dotwork Forearm Cat Glasses Whiskers Animal portrait

Find an artist for this

Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The spectacles had belonged to a dead clerk, and the cat had won them from his widow by reading her the small print of her own lease. Nobody in Thornwick Vale could say when she had learned her letters. Each morning she sat on the bridge wall with her knitted hat pulled low and read the notices nailed to the church door, aloud, in a dry voice that carried as far as the mill.

Keep reading

The winter the river froze to its bed, the king's reeve nailed up a decree. Every household was to surrender its woollens to the tithe barn at Candlemas, or pay in grain the village did not have. The cat read it twice, took the reeve's pen from behind his ear while he was busy coughing, and added a line beneath the royal seal. Nobody could later agree on the wording, but the mill-wife swore it said that a hat is not a woollen while it is on a head.

So the women of the vale sat up by the stove through the long dark and knitted. They knitted ribbed caps for the children, striped jumpers for the old men, and high collars for the pigs, the goose and the reeve's sour dog. When the tithe men came up the frozen road at Candlemas, they found the whole village wrapped to the ears and not one thing in it that could be carried off.

The cat watched them from the bridge wall, her spectacles misting with each breath. The chief tithe man looked at the goose, then at her, and asked whether she would be wanting to pay her own share. She pushed the spectacles up her nose and told him to read the small print again.