Black and grey line drawing of a large-eyed black cat inside a lace oval frame, with peonies and leaves below, as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat in lace frame with peonies

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A simple cartoon cat with large round eyes and tall ears sits centred within a lace-patterned oval frame. Two full peony blooms and several leaves fill the lower half of the composition. The design is drawn in black linework with some dotted and hatched shading in the frame, on a plain tan paper background.

Botanical Neo-trad Cat Peony Lace Frame Leaves Flower

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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

Old Marjorie Penhale kept her peonies behind a hedge of lace-leaved fern, and the black cat that came with the cottage kept the mice off them. Nobody had named it. It had great round eyes and ears like the points of a pair of scissors, and each morning it sat on the gatepost as if it were waiting for the post.

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One wet spring the buds came up red and tight, and then a frost came back in May and blackened every one of them. Marjorie sat on the step with her apron over her knees and said nothing for an hour. The cat climbed down, walked the length of the border, and came back with a single bud between its teeth, which it laid on her boot.

Marjorie was no fool. She knew a gift when one was left on her boot. She went indoors, fetched her grandmother's lace collar from the bottom drawer, and pinned it to the back gate. Then she went out every evening with a jug of warm water and a clean rag, and washed the blackened leaves one at a time while the cat watched from the wall.

By June the peonies had opened, heavy as wet laundry, and the cat had grown thin and proud. The village said the old woman had bargained with something. Marjorie said only that the cat had done the work and she had merely held the jug. When the first bloom fell, she gathered it up and set it on the gatepost, where the cat sat until dusk, looking at it the way you look at a letter you have finally been given.