A black cat tattoo with a curled tail, blue eyes and a pink collar, surrounded by faint grey swirls and small stars on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat with curled tail

Mixed · Photo

A stylised black cat with a long curled tail, blue eyes and a pink collar with a blue round tag, filled in solid black. Faint grey swirling scrolls and small star shapes sit beneath it, with fine grey linework. The cat is centred on a pale skin background, and the black fill dominates while the blue and pink accents stand out.

Cat Black cat Collar Swirl 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

Sit down, sit, the bench is only cold on the left side. You want the tale of the cat at Fenwick Bridge? Then hush, because she does not care to hear her name said too loudly at a border.

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She was black as a coal scuttle, with a tail that curled up over her head like a question nobody had bothered to answer. Round her neck she wore a pink collar, and on it a blue tag stamped with the number of the post. Her eyes were the blue of cold milk. She sat on the customs ledger every night, and the men who worked the crossing said she had never once been moved off it. Smugglers tried her with sardines, with ribbon, with a crate of lemons. She watched them the way a magistrate watches a liar.

The turn came in the wet March, when a lorry driver brought in a crate marked clocks and the inspector, Mr Halloran, waved it through without a glance. Halloran had a pocket full of folded notes and a new wife who liked hats. The cat rose, walked the length of the desk, and sat squarely on the ledger, tail lashing. Halloran shooed her. She did not budge. He lifted her by the scruff and she went limp as a wet glove, heavier than any cat had a right to be, and the ink beneath her smeared a long grey streak across the page where the lorry's name had been written.

By morning the ledger was evidence and Halloran was gone to the city. The cat still sits on the same desk, and the grey swirls of smudged ink on the page still look like smoke rising from something put out properly. If you cross tonight, leave her a saucer of milk and check your papers twice, because she has never once been wrong about a liar.