Small black cat with a curled tail and whiskers, with a trail of paw prints rising towards the hairline on the back of a person's neck.

Cat and paw prints at the nape

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black cat is drawn in a simple, solid silhouette with a curled tail and a face showing eyes and whiskers. A trail of paw prints climbs upwards from the cat towards the hairline. The tattoo is set against warm, softly lit skin, with the back of the head and an ear partly visible but no face shown.

Neck Cat Paw print Tail Whiskers

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

Nobody had swept the hall since the Friday bake sale, so flour from the trestle tables still lay in drifts along the stage steps when we arrived at half seven. Gareth from the year above swore the caretaker had barred the cat from the building years ago, but there were prints in the flour all the same, small and neat, starting at the bottom step and climbing.

Keep reading

I followed them past the trophy cabinet and the dead rubber plant, over the lid of the old upright piano, and up the frame of the honours board, where the names of head boys and prefects are painted in gold leaf. Soot had been the school's cat when I was eleven, a black thing with a bent tail who slept on the radiator outside Mr Pryce's office and never once let anyone pick him up. He'd been dead since the millennium, as far as anyone knew.

He was sitting on the top edge of the board, right beside the year I'd have been head boy if I hadn't been caught up the bell tower. His tail curled round his feet. He looked at me the way he always had, as if I owed him a dinner. Gareth wanted to ring someone, or at least get a torch, but I told him to leave the poor old thing alone.

When we went out at ten, the prints led us back down the steps and across the car park, one after another, to the gate. They stopped there in the wet tarmac, neat as a full stop, and I stood a while looking at the empty road, half expecting him to be sitting on the wall with his tail round his feet, waiting to be let in.