Black ink tattoo of a stretching cat in loose brush-stroke linework, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black brush-stroke cat on ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A stretching cat in a silhouette-like outline is drawn in black ink on the side of the ribs. The linework is loose and tapered, with varied stroke thickness and solid black areas that suggest a brush-painted look. The skin is pale and the photo is taken at an angle with a plain background.

Ribs Cat Silhouette

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 snow came over the Carrow Pass a week before the mules were due, and my father swore the cat had called it down. She was a grey tom with a torn ear who sat on the wall of the waystation and watched the track as if he were paid to. Nobody kept him. He kept us.

Keep reading

The brush-seller came up in October with a case of ink sticks and a face like wet paper. He wanted a bed for the night and a clean sheet of paper, and he paid in cakes of soot-black ink that smelt of pine smoke. Before dawn I found him at the wall, painting the cat in a handful of strokes: the arch of the back, the tail lifted like a question, the ears pinned flat against the wind. He did not hurry. Each line came off the brush thick at the start and thin at the end, as though the animal had stretched itself right out of the stone.

When the string of mules came down the switchbacks in the storm, the leader stopped dead beside the wall where the drawing was. The cat had gone, but the ink was still there, and the mules would not step past it. My father led them round by the scree, cursing every step, and the whole string lived.

The brush-seller left at first light with his case one stick lighter. I never learned his name. Some winters I still climb to the wall and find the ink faded to the colour of old rain, and the grey tom asleep along the top of it, one paw reaching down toward the road, as if to say the way is that way.