Ink line drawing flash design of a cat curled inside an ornate beaded frame beside a rose, in a neo-traditional style, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat and rose tattoo design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencilled and inked design sheet showing a cat's head and body inside an oval frame, with a large rose at the top and a decorative swirl and feather-like pattern around the edges. The linework is fine and detailed, with some shading and a faint pink wash behind the rose and swirls. The composition is centred on the cat, with the rose and ornamental elements arranged around it on a pale sheet of paper.

Neo-trad Cat Rose Ornament Swirl Feather

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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 nearer the brazier, and mind the smoke, for my throat is older than the stones of this town and I will not shout you the tale. You want the grey cat, then? Very well. Her name was Tefnakht, and she belonged to a potter's widow in Thebes who fed her on the heads of river fish and told her every morning that she was lazy.

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One summer the widow's son came home from a caravan out of Byblos carrying a rose in a clay jar, a thing no one on that street had ever seen. Its petals were red as pomegranate juice and folded tight, like a letter nobody had yet read. The widow wanted it sold. The cat wanted it more. Tefnakht curled herself in its shade on the sill, and when the widow tried to shift her, she only turned her back and sulked, dragging feathers in from the reed beds and laying them in a ring about the jar as though to fence it in.

The rose died within a month, as roses do in dust. The son took a boat south to the quarries at Aswan and did not write. Each dusk after that the cat walked down to the landing and sat at the water's edge, watching for a sail. Each morning she came back with a single feather, and each morning the widow swept it up and cursed the vermin that brought it. The neighbours called the cat a witch and kept their children off the steps.

Then one evening in the month of flooding, a boat came round the bend with its sail the colour of bread crust, and a young man stood in the prow shading his eyes. Tefnakht did not run to him. She walked back up the lane, past the sweeping widow, and lay down on the sill beside the dead rose, and the feathers lay around her in a perfect oval, pale as the wings of a heron. The widow stopped sweeping. For once she did not say a word about lazy cats.