Small black line tattoo of a stretching cat with a curled tail, paw prints and one red heart paw print, placed on the upper chest near the collarbone.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat and paw prints on upper chest

Chest · Mixed · Photo

A small tattoo of a cat stretching upward, with its tail curling down beside the body, shown in solid black ink. Three to four paw prints sit above the cat, and one of them has a red heart in place of the pad. The tattoo is centred on pale skin at the upper chest, with the edge of a dark top visible at the left.

Chest Cat Paw print Heart Tail

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 black cat came in under the lost property hatch every morning at six, before the 6.12 had rattled the glass in its frames. Nobody owned her. Eddie on the barrier said she was born in the goods shed the spring they electrified the line, and she had the look of a creature who had watched every timetable change and approved of none of them. I kept a saucer of milk behind the counter for her, beside the umbrellas nobody had claimed since March.

Keep reading

She had a habit I came to rely on. She would sit at the end of the platform bench, stretch upward until her spine made a long black question mark, then let her tail drop and curl beside her like a ribbon someone had let go of. It was the first thing she did each day, before the milk, before the pigeons. The rest of us checked the departure boards. She seemed to check the sky.

In October the rain came sideways for a week and the subway steps flooded to the third tread. I found her prints on the wet concrete outside the lost property room, four of them, then four more, walking in a line toward the dry bricks under the canopy. The last print had a smear of red in the pad where a tin of signal paint had been knocked over, and she had padded straight through it, so the trail she left behind wore a small bright heart.

I never told Eddie. Some mornings I still set out the saucer and wait for the thump of her landing on the counter, and when the platform is clear I walk its length looking for prints gone soft in the grime. I find them now and then. They always lead somewhere dry.