Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a big cat's head framed by geometric mandala ornaments on the calf, shown in three side-by-side views.

Big cat head with geometric mandala on a calf

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A large cat's head, with spotted markings and a fierce, forward-facing expression, is framed by layered geometric mandala ornaments above, below and to the sides. The design uses stippled dotwork for shading and fine solid linework for the outlines and facial detail. The image is a black and white triptych showing the calf from the front and both sides.

Dotwork Geometric Blackwork Other Big cat Leopard Cat head Mandala Pattern

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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

Mr Ashdown has moved the lamp again, so I am writing this by the window where the light is poor and my eyes ache for it. You asked in your last letter whether the Carrow plates are finished. They are not. The cat in the third plate still looks like a man who has been told bad news. I have stippled his cheek nine times, and each time the dots bunch like frost on a pane, which is what I told Mr Ashdown it was supposed to do.

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The beast came up from the Whitby docks in a crate that smelt of tar and something sweeter, a snow leopard's skin the captain had bought off a Russian sailor who swore it came from the Pamirs. We were to copy its face for the frontispiece. Mr Ashdown wanted the eyes pale and furious. I wanted the spots right, and it was the spots that kept me up. Each rosette had to be a cluster of tiny points, never a line, or the plate would print grey and dead.

Last Thursday I sat with the skin and my loupe and counted the dots on one flank until the candle guttered. Three thousand and some. When I looked up, the frost ferns I had drawn in the margin had grown across the whole sheet in my head, six points each, folding in on the cat until he sat in the middle of them like something that had been asleep for a century and resented being woken.

I have finished the fourth plate the way I wanted it. Tell Mr Ashdown the engraving is done and that I will not be taking the leopard home. He belongs in the copper now, and I find I am glad of it. Yours in haste, Edith Lowe.