Black and grey realism tattoo of a black cat sitting on an old book beside a rose and thorny vines, with Latin script below, on a person's upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat, rose and book on a back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A black cat sits on a worn leather-bound book, looking to one side, with a rose and thorny vine branches to the left and right. The fur, book and rose are shaded in fine greys with soft highlights and strong dark tones for depth. Two lines of Latin script run across the lower right of the design on the skin, and the background is a plain, slightly blurred area of skin.

Realism Back Cat Book Rose Thorn Vine Latin text

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

The binder of Carrow Ford kept a black cat called Mistle that would not leave the ledger. Every morning it sat on the closed book on his bench, turned its head away from the window, and stared at the one stain of rose oil on the cover. Nobody in Carrow Ford thought this strange until the spring the roses went black along the churchyard wall.

Keep reading

The old binder, Tobias Hythe, had been paid by the Lord of Thornhall to bind a book that would not close. Its pages stayed blank until someone wrote in them, and then the words crawled off the paper and went looking for a new reader. He stitched it shut with waxed thread and sent it back. The lord sent it again. Written on the flyleaf in a hand nobody could place were the words Non vivificatur nisi prius moriatur, which the priest translated as it is not quickened unless first it dies.

Hythe did not like the Latin and tried to be rid of the book. He burned the rose, then sank the volume in the millpond. The cat fished both out with its teeth and sat back down upon the leather as if nothing had happened. On the ninth night Hythe gave it what it wanted. He cut his own ledger page by page and fed each leaf to the stove, and the house went quiet and cold.

In the morning the cat was still on the book, but the book was shut, and the thorns had grown back over the window in a neat black lattice. The priest says the binder was buried beneath the rose wall, and the cat still keeps the lid, watching the road for the next lord who wants a book that will not close.