Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a black cat looking at a crystal ball, with a red rose and a jack-o-lantern on a lower leg, shown in three side-by-side panels.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat and crystal ball on a leg

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A black cat with bright yellow-green eyes sits behind a glowing crystal ball filled with purple and green swirls and white stars. A red rose, a carved orange pumpkin and small mice sit around the edges, with purple and orange smoke rising behind the cat. The bold outlines and saturated colour are typical of neo-traditional work, and the photo is split into three panels showing the same tattoo.

Neo-trad Calf Black cat Rose Jack-o-lantern Pumpkin Smoke Star Mouse

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

Mind the step, it's worn smooth by a hundred years of boots, and mind the dog, which isn't ours. Sit down. You'll want the cat and the ball both, and I'll give you them, but you'll have them in the order they came over the line, because that's the only honest way to tell it. It was the last night of October, and the crossing at Hollin Bridge was a lamp, a tin kettle and a guard called Tomas Veer, who had seen nothing more interesting than smugglers' Christmas geese in eleven winters. Then came a woman with a crystal ball wrapped in a horse blanket, a black cat riding her shoulder like a fur collar, and a carved pumpkin under her arm with a candle stub glowing in its grin. 'What's in the ball?' Veer asked. 'Tomorrow,' she said, 'and the day after, and whatever the far side keeps down its cellars.' He laughed and lifted the barrier.

Keep reading

The cat did not laugh. It slid down her coat, walked to the white line where the paint had worn to nothing, and sat there with its yellow eyes fixed on him, like two lamps left burning in a house nobody lives in. Behind the sandbags the field mice came out in a neat line. Purple and orange smoke rose from the pumpkin and drifted over the kettle until Veer found he could not lift his feet. The woman laid her palm flat on the glass. Stars wheeled slowly through the swirls inside it. 'Now,' she said, quite pleasantly, 'tell me what you're carrying.'

He had a letter in his breast pocket, unposted, for a sister married on the far side, a letter asking to be forgiven for missing the wedding. He had never said so aloud. The ball showed him the envelope, then the sister's kitchen, then a gate standing open, and his boots were moving before he had agreed to anything. When the barrier came down behind him, the cat was back on the white line, washing a paw. The mice had gone. The pumpkin's grin had gone out. Veer still has the letter, and he never posted it, and he never went back.