Black ink drawing of a silhouetted cat sitting on a crescent moon wrapped in vines and five-petal flowers, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement.

Black cat on a crescent moon with flowers

Botanical · Black and grey · Flash

A solid black cat with white eyes and a curled tail sits on the inner curve of a crescent moon. The moon is outlined in fine line and decorated with vines, tendrils and bold filled flowers, with small open blossoms along its edge. The design is drawn in black ink on white paper with no shading or colour.

Botanical Cat Moon Crescent moon Flower Vine Leaves Tendril

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

Brother Anselm has been dead three weeks, and the cat has not once come down from the wall above the herb beds, so it falls to you to carry the lantern out after compline. You are not sure whether you are being asked to feed it or to watch it. The abbot says it is neither your business nor his, that the cat came over the river wall in the autumn flood and chose the cloister roof the way a bishop chooses a see.

Keep reading

The garden is at its quietest hour. Frost has stiffened the mint and the lovage has gone grey at the edges. Beyond the south wall the river carries a thin silver crescent in its black water, and somewhere above it a bell from the town is counting out the hour in short, careful strokes. You set the lantern on the step and the cat turns its head, unhurried, its white eyes catching the light as if someone had painted them on last. Its tail curls once around its paws, then uncurls.

Anselm kept a book of pressed flowers, every one labelled in a hand that sloped like a man leaning into weather. You found it in the scriptorium drawer with a bookmark of blue ribbon stopping at the page for wild clematis. Beside the drawing someone had pencilled a question: does the moon grow the vine, or the vine climb the moon? You have been turning that over since morning, and the cat, you suspect, has been turning it over longer.

On the fourth night you stop bringing the lantern. In the morning there is a single black hair caught on the flowering gate, and the vine above the gate has put out three new blossoms, each one dark as ink, each one open towards the empty wall where the cat used to sit.