Black ink tattoo of a stylised big cat face framed by lotus petals and a mandala ornament, shown on a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Big cat face with lotus mandala

Blackwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised big cat face looks forward with sweeping whisker lines, swept markings above the eyes and a pointed ornament on the forehead. Layered lotus petals and scrolled mandala rings sit behind the face, drawn in black linework with solid fills and dotted detail. The design is symmetrical and fills the frame, with no colour ink.

Blackwork Botanical Other Big cat Cat face Lotus Mandala Petal Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been on the scaffold since first light, tapping mortar out of the joints above the gatehouse at Caddon Keep, when she first saw the cat. It was carved into the keystone, a broad face with its brow hooded under a pointed ornament like a flame, and lotus petals fanning out behind it in rings. Rain had softened the edges to almost nothing. Wind had worn the eyes away. Only the whiskers still ran down in long, deliberate strokes, as though someone had been careful about them.

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Old Tam, who had kept the grounds for forty years, said the stone cat had been put up by a lord who lost his wife to a fever and wanted something to watch the road. He said it with the air of a man repeating a thing he had stopped believing. Nell didn't ask what the lord had made of the lotus. She was busy wondering why the pond in the inner court, dry since the roof fell in, held water again the morning after she first climbed the scaffold.

She went down at dusk to look. The water was black and still, and a single lotus had opened in it, white at the centre, though no lotus grew there. On the far bank something moved low through the nettles, and then a big cat stood at the edge with its eyes lit like coins. Its face was the keystone's face exactly, the swept stripes above the brow, the scrolled ruff of fur. It lowered its head to drink. Nell had a bowl of bread and milk in her hands and did not remember fetching it.

In the morning she mortared the keystone clean, carved a small lotus into the lintel beside it, and left the bowl on the step below the gate. Tam found it empty and said nothing. The pond stayed full all that summer.