Traditional-style tattoo of a black cat head with red inner ears, orange-yellow eyes, whiskers and an open red mouth showing fangs, on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat head in traditional style

Traditional · Mixed · Photo

A bold black cat head faces forward, with red inner ears, a red nose and an open red mouth showing white fangs. The solid black fill is shaded with soft grey highlights, and the eyes have orange irises with white highlights. Thick black outlines and long whisker lines frame the design against a plain background of skin.

Traditional Cat Black cat Whiskers Fangs Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Ada Penhallow had not wanted the cat, and said so every morning when it sat on the lamp-room rail and stared at the sea as if it owed the sea money. The cat had come up the cliff path in a sack from the Penzance boat, and nobody on Skerrick Head knew what to call a thing so black, so they called it Mister, because Mister is what the Admiralty called anything it had not yet paid for.

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Mister was no good at mice. He was good at the other thing. Each dusk, when the fog rolled off the Sound and the foghorn started its long complaint, the cat would go to the seaward wall and open his mouth at nothing, showing his fangs in the lamp's sweep, orange eyes gone wide and gold. The men on the supply boat swore he was warning them off the reef. Ada swore he was yawning. Only the widow Tregarthen, who kept the bell buoy's log, said he was counting the ships, and that the number always came out one short.

The night the Marigold went onto the Crane rocks, Ada climbed the spiral stairs with a cold lantern and found Mister on the gallery, teeth bared at the dark. She cursed him, then looked where he looked, and saw a single lamp bobbing in the fog, lower than it should have been.

She lit the big lamp twice as fast as she had ever done. Then she sat down beside the cat and waited for the flares, and for once she did not begrudge him his company.