Back view of a woman with a bold neo-traditional tattoo of a black cat with green eyes arching on a pink crescent moon, placed on her upper back.

Black cat on a pink crescent moon on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Mixed · Photo

A black cat with green eyes arches its back while perched on a pink crescent moon, with a small pink star beside it. The cat is filled in solid black with bold outlines and simple highlights, and the moon and star add a touch of colour. The design sits between the shoulder blades, with the subject photographed from behind against a plain cream wall.

Neo-trad Back Cat Black cat Crescent moon Moon Star

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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 are the one who lets the cat out of its cage each evening, because nobody else at Marchetti's Travelling Fair will go near the animal since it bit the strongman's brother. Its name is Sable, though the stallholders call it the Vicar, and its green eyes catch the arc lamps like bottle glass. Every dusk you carry it to the painted crescent on the hook-a-duck stall and set it down, and every night it arches its back as if the moon were a stair it had only just remembered how to climb.

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Tonight the fair is short a generator and long on rain. The Ferris wheel stops with a groan halfway up, and a girl in a pink dress stands at the foot of the ladder, counting coins into your palm. She wants to know whether the cat is lucky. You tell her the truth, which is that luck is something you sell by the ticket, and the cat sells nothing at all. She laughs and asks what it would take to make it follow her home.

You don't answer. Instead you open the cage door and watch Sable walk down the wet boards, past the candyfloss, past the flat-cap men gathering under the tarpaulin, straight to the girl's feet. It sits. Then it looks back at you over its shoulder, the way it always does before it leaves, and the wheel shudders and begins to turn again.

By morning the lot is packed and the crescent is gone from the stall, leaving a pale ring on the boards. Sable is curled on the seat of the last carriage somewhere on the road to Taunton, and in your pocket is a ticket stub with a name written on it in pencil. You keep it. Some debts pay out in ways the ledger never expects.