Traditional style tattoo of a black cat's head with yellow eyes inside a red heart and green scalloped border, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat head in a heart on an arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black cat's head faces forward with yellow eyes, a pink nose and whiskers, set inside a red heart shape edged with a green scalloped border. The cat is shaded with dark ink and fine strokes for fur, while the heart and border use solid red and green fills with bold outlines. A striped red and white sleeve and a dark background sit beside the tattoo, which is centred on the arm.

Traditional Upper arm Cat Black cat Heart Whiskers

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 cat came aboard at Grimsby in a sack of onions, which is how most good things came aboard the Mary Quill. Nobody claimed him. I was cook, so I fed him herring heads from the bucket, and he repaid me by sleeping on the bread dough until it rose with the shape of his back pressed into it.

Keep reading

We ran coal and then timber along the Dutch coast for three winters. The galley was the warmest room aboard and he knew it. He'd sit on the stove rail with his eyes half shut while the pans clanged, and the men said a black cat was luck on a ship. I said it was only good sense on his part. When the glass fell off Lowestoft in February, he came to the galley door, sat down on the step and would not come in, so I stayed put with the stew pot lashed to the range. It was the only sensible thing a cook can do in a sea like that.

The sea took Tobias Reed off the foremast that night, the man who sang in the forecastle every evening. Next morning, when I came down to make skilly for the watch, I found the cat walking the length of the mess table, lamp still swinging above him. He sat down beside the empty bench where Reed used to eat and looked at me as if I'd been slow with the porridge.

At Harwich we paid off and the crew scattered with their kitbags. I went ashore without looking back. The next morning, when I went down to the quay to see the boat one last time, there he sat on the bollard, yellow eyes fixed on the galley hatch, waiting for a bucket of herring heads that nobody was going to fill. I bought a fish from the stall by the slipway and split it on the stone for him.