Neo-traditional forearm tattoo of a hairless cat head above a red spiral sun and a beetle, with red, grey and black ink.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and beetle neo-traditional forearm tattoo

Neo-trad · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A hairless cat head with a striped headdress sits at the top of the design, above a red and white spiral set against a striped triangle. A dark beetle with red and grey detailing sits at the base, and the tattoo is shaded with fine dotwork around the sun. Bold black outlines and mostly solid fills with red and blue-grey tones give it a bright, graphic look.

Neo-trad Dotwork Forearm Cat Beetle Spiral Sun Stripe Triangle

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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 mop the gallery floor in the hour after the school parties leave, when the Egyptian room hums and the lights are dimmed to a bruise-coloured blue. The sphinx-cat in case seven has been your favourite since your first week. Its lacquered headdress is striped like a deckchair, and its eyes, two chips of green glass, follow the mop across the tiles whether you look at them or not.

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Tonight the case is open. Nobody has told you why. The little wooden scarab that usually lies beside the cat's paws is no longer on its cushion. It is on your shoe, cold and heavier than wood should be. You stand very still. Somewhere behind the plinths a radiator knocks, and the camera's red dot blinks twice, as if it agrees this is a bad idea.

Mr Dacey, the night guard, used to say the animals in this room were never ours to keep, only to mind. So you crouch and set the beetle back on its cushion. Its belly is warm now. The cat yawns, which cats do not do behind glass, and its gaze moves past you to the painted sun on the back wall, a red spiral that you realise has been turning slowly for the last ten minutes.

At six the cleaners' van pulls in, the case is locked, and the inventory sheet reads as it always does: one cat, one scarab, nothing moved. You sign your name beneath it anyway, and in the margin, small as a full stop, you draw a spiral.