Fine line tattoo of a black cat with green eyes sitting on a crescent moon entwined with flowers and vines, shown on skin.

Black cat on a crescent moon

Fine line · Mixed · Photo

A black cat with green eyes sits on the inside curve of a crescent moon, with its tail curling up beside it. The crescent is outlined in fine black linework and decorated with vines, five-petal flowers and small green blossoms. The cat is solid black with a few thin lines for whiskers, and the green accents are the only colour in the design.

Fine line Botanical Cat Moon Crescent Flower Vine Leaves

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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 find the cat on the fourteenth floor, sitting on the wrong side of the railings as if someone had posted it there. Its eyes are the green of the sodden lawn three storeys down, and it does not look at you so much as through you, the way the old men at the bus shelter study the sky when they are deciding whether to bother with an umbrella. The lift has been broken since Tuesday. Mrs Okonedo on eleven says the cat belongs to nobody, which is what people say about the things they are fond of.

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Each night the moon hangs over the car park like a bitten biscuit, and each night the cat climbs to sit in the hollow of it. You start counting. Seven nights, then eight. On the ninth you bring a tin of sardines and a torch, and find the cat has moved to the dented bin lid by the bike shed, tail curled round its feet as if it is waiting for a bus of its own.

Ivy grows up the back of the block, through the cracks in the stairwell and over the bins, and the cat walks along it like a tightrope walker who has never once looked down. You think of your gran's tablecloth, with its climbing roses stitched round the edge, and how she always said a wild thing wants a frame. So you pick the leaves off the wall and carry them up in your coat pockets, twelve flights, and lay them along the windowsill in a crescent. The cat watches. When the moon finally clears the flats, it looks as though someone has stitched it shut with green thread.

On the last night the cat is gone and the sardines sit untouched. You lean out with the torch, and the beam catches a tail curling over the parapet of the roof opposite, a black stroke against the sky. You keep one leaf in your pocket after that, and when the bus is late you hold it up to the streetlight and check the moon through it.