Solid black cat tattoo with a tall curling tail on the lower back, shown against pale skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Black cat with raised tail on the back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black silhouette of a cat with its tail raised high in a long S-curve, seen from behind with the head and ears at the base. The linework is smooth with fully filled black ink and no shading. The pale skin behind it keeps the design centred and clearly visible.

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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

Mind the step, that's where the last carter lost his mule, and his temper with it. Now, you asked about the cat, so sit down and let the wind have its say first.

Keep reading

Up on the Hollin Pass there was a black cat that nobody owned. It kept to the drystone walls above the inn at Scarrow Gap, and it walked the ridge as though the mountain had been built for its feet. When the snow came down thick enough to bury the milestones, the cat would come down to the inn's back door and sit with its tail raised high, bent in a long S like a river through a valley, and it would not move until someone followed it.

Old Tamsin Brack followed it one January night, lantern swinging, with the drovers' bell tied on her wrist. The cat led her off the road to a hollow where three men lay under a fallen wagon, one with his leg pinned and the others already still. She dragged the living one out by the collar, and the cat walked ahead of them down the switchbacks, never once looking back, its tail a black question mark against the white.

They say that is why the inn hangs a carved cat above its door, and why no one on the pass will whistle at a cat in the dark. Mind you, the drovers say the cat only went home that night and stayed. I have never been able to decide which of them is the liar, so I tell it both ways, and you may choose your own.

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