Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a black cat with yellow eyes, red roses and green leaves on the outer thigh, framed by gold scrollwork and a teal banner.

Black cat portrait with roses on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A black cat with yellow eyes faces the viewer in a detailed portrait, set within a gold scrollwork frame and a teal banner with lettering across the top. Three red roses with dark shading and green leaves fill the lower half of the composition. Bold outlines, smooth shading and saturated colour are used throughout, and the tattoo covers much of the outer thigh.

Neo-trad Traditional Thigh Cat Black cat Rose Banner Scrollwork Leaves Portrait

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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

Sit yourselves down on the drum, all of you, and keep your fingers off the rope, for the trestle creaks. You've all seen the painted board out front, the black cat in her gold frame with the roses heaped round her like a wreath. Her name was Peepants, which is no name for a cat with eyes like two lamps in a chapel, but my grandmother had it lettered that way and never once apologised.

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Peepants came to the fair in 1911, riding in a hatbox on the shoulder of a fortune-teller called Mrs Vesey, who read tea leaves and lied about nearly everything except the cat. She rode the waltzer with her eyes shut. She slept on the ticket box, on the strongman's chest, and once on the Lord Mayor's top hat, which he wore to the parade anyway. Every night she walked the wagon line and sat down outside whichever caravan owed money, and by morning the debt was gone, though nobody could say whether it had been paid or simply forgotten.

The autumn Mrs Vesey died, the fair packed up in the rain and the cat would not get into the lorry. She sat in the wet grass by the gate, paws together, looking back at the empty field. Grandmother always said the roses on the board were red because that field had been red with them that year, spilled from a florist's cart that overturned at the bend. Nobody went back to find out.

So when you look at the cat, look at her eyes, not the banner or the gold. She is still waiting at that gate, and she has never once been in a hurry.