Realistic cat head with fangs resting on a skull, with red brushstrokes and black and teal ink splashes, tattooed on a lower leg.

Cat and skull with red and black splashes on a leg

Realism · Calf · Mixed · Photo

A snarling cat with bared fangs sits above a grey skull, both shaded realistically in black and grey. Vertical red brushstrokes and loose black and teal splashes run behind and through the design, giving it a painterly look. The motif is centred on the leg, with the splashes spreading out to the edges of the composition.

Realism Calf Cat Skull Fangs Brushstroke Splatter Watercolour

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

The cat had slept on the skull for three winters before anyone thought to move either of them. Mags Ferrier found them in the chapel of Carrow Keep, the roof long gone and rain pooling on the flagstones, the skull set on the altar step like an offering and the ginger tom curled over its crown as if it were a cushion. When she reached out, the cat lifted its lip and showed her two yellow fangs.

Keep reading

Nobody in Carrow would climb the keep after dark, but the county had sent Mags up with her paints to record the frescoes before the damp finished them. The walls were already bleeding. Red ochre ran down the plaster in long vertical streaks where water had found its way through, and wherever the lime had crumbled, black mould had blossomed in loose, spattered blooms. She mixed her grey and began with the skull, because the skull at least would hold still.

By evening the cat had stopped hissing and started watching her brush. She painted its ears laid back, its whiskers pale against the stone, and then, without quite deciding to, she splashed teal lichen across the corners of the page and dragged a red stroke straight down through the middle, the way the damp did. When the surveyor came in spring he found one finished sheet propped against the altar: a snarl laid over a skull, storms of colour spilling out to the edges, and beneath it a note in her small hand.

The note read: the keeper has moved on, leave the bones be. The altar step was bare when he went back, though the flagstones were dry for the first time in years and a warm hollow sat in the dust where something had been sleeping.