Colour tattoo of a black cat with glowing yellow eyes, set against blue watercolour splashes and red scratch marks on an upper arm.

Black cat with blue splash on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A black cat with yellow eyes sits within a vertical panel, with its head turned upwards on the top half and its face and eyes shown below a thin red crosshair. Realistic shading gives the fur depth, while blue watercolour splashes, red slash marks and black ink drips surround the cat. The tattoo is shown from the front on an upper arm, with the colour fading softly into the skin at the edges.

Realism Upper arm Cat Black cat Watercolour splash Ink drip Eye

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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 have the cat in the hold before the lock keeper has finished shouting at the tide. Nobody on the Mary Ellen ever admits to owning a cat, so the black shape that lands on the coal sacks at Limehouse is simply there, the way damp is there, and you decide not to ask where it came from.

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It keeps to the bow for three nights. Each dawn it sits on the rail facing upriver with its chin lifted, as though it is reading the far bank through the fog for something written there. Ada, who works the tiller and has opinions about everything that floats, says it is waiting for a fare. You think it is waiting for Tom Pardoe, who loaded crates for the Pearl Wharf gang and walked off the Isle of Dogs one Sunday and never came back. You have never said so out loud.

On the fourth night the tide turns early and the chain snaps at the mooring. The barge slews into the piles, red paint scraping grey stone, and you go over the side with a boathook and nothing else. The river is the colour of wet slate and twice as cold. When you surface, the cat is already on the bollard above you, eyes like two lamps, and it does not blink until you have hauled yourself out onto the ladder.

Ada's lamp finds you shivering on the towpath an hour later. The cat is gone, but three long scores run across the top coal sack, dark as spilt ink, and someone has chalked a small cross on the hatch cover where the pardoe name used to be painted. Ada says nothing about the new rope. Neither do you, though you keep looking upriver until the fog thins enough to show the empty bank.