Full colour realism sleeve tattoo on an upper arm showing a tabby cat in a bow tie and top hat, a second cat with orange eyes, and butterflies.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and butterfly sleeve on an arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A full sleeve tattoo runs down a woman's arm, seen from behind with her face out of frame. At the top, a realistic tabby cat wears a black top hat and bow tie, and below it a second cat with orange eyes is rendered in soft shading. Butterflies in orange, yellow and blue are scattered across green and teal washes, and the colour ink dominates the image.

Realism Upper arm Forearm Cat Bow tie Top hat Butterfly Sleeve

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

Mind the step, that's the one Ada broke with her bucket. Right, so the grey tom came down the gangway at Newlyn the same week the Mary Ellen went out with her hold empty and her skipper green in the face. Nobody had ever seen him before and nobody could say where he'd jumped aboard. He sat on a coil of rope in a black top hat, bow tie done up tight as a church door, and he watched the men haul like a magistrate.

Keep reading

Skipper Tregenna swore he'd not have a cat on his boat, not one with airs. But the cat had a way of standing at the bow when the weather turned, and every time he did, the nets came up heavy. Three nights running the fleet came in light and the Mary Ellen came in full. Men started touching their caps to him. Dolly Pascoe, who kept the chandlery, swore she saw a ginger lady cat with amber eyes on the breakwater one dusk, and that the two of them were talking in a language made of butterflies.

Then the storm came up off the Lizard, and the tom stepped down into the wheelhouse, sat by the lamp, and would not move. Tregenna cursed, then wept, then steered them home by the one light the cat kept looking at. When the boat was tied up, the hat was gone from the rope, and a single blue butterfly lay on the wet planks, its wings still closing.

Tregenna never saw the tom again. But on still mornings the men say the Mary Ellen's nets come up thick with silver fish and, now and then, a bow tie of kelp.