Traditional style tattoo of a black cat head with red ears, wide staring eyes and a dotted starry background, on a limb with other tattoos nearby.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat head with red ears on a limb

Traditional · Other · Mixed · Photo

A black cat's head with red ears, wide white eyes and an open, snarling mouth fills the centre of the design. The black fill is built from fine stippled dots and small star shapes, with bold dark outlines around the features. Red, blue, yellow and white accents sit against the black, and partial tattoos of a moth and a snake are visible at the edges of the frame.

Traditional Dotwork Other Cat Black cat Star Eye Moth Snake

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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

You know the cat by the way it sits on the milk crate at the end of platform four, as though the last northbound had been timetabled for its benefit. Its fur is the black of a sky with the lamps switched off, scattered with stars, and it has red ears like a thing that has won most of its fights. The porter says it belongs to nobody. The ticket office says it has been on the books since before the modernisation, under a number nobody can find.

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Tonight the last train is cancelled. The board says so in amber letters, and you are the only one left under the canopy with a rucksack and a Thermos going cold. The cat stands when the wind comes down the line. Its mouth opens in that snarl, pink and furred with white at the teeth, and you expect a hiss, but it turns its head and looks past you at the empty rails, the way people stare at a train they know is not coming and cannot stop expecting.

Then a light appears at the far end. It is not a headlamp. It is smaller, a glow that flickers like a moth against a carriage window. The cat drops from the crate and walks towards it without looking back, its stars catching the sodium light as it goes. You shoulder your bag. Somewhere behind the ticket office a bell rings twice, and the board clicks over to read ON TIME, and for the first time all evening you decide to believe it.