Glossy red outline of a cat curled around a heart on a plain black background, shown as a flat design rather than a tattoo on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat curled around a heart outline

Colour · Flash

A single red outline of a cat curled around a heart, with the cat's head at the upper right and its whiskers drawn as short lines. The line has a shiny, raised finish against a flat black background. The simple, centred composition places the heart in the lower half of the image.

Cat Heart Outline

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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

The cat came back the third morning after the bulb man left, sitting on the bonnet of my van as if she had paid for it. I was kneeling in the workshop doorway, coaxing a glass tube round a bend it did not want to make, and I told her she could wait like everyone else.

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Our harbour town has more gulls than sense, and the sign I was making was for the Lantern, a bar at the bottom of Fish Quay Steps. Maggie Orr wanted a heart with a cat curled round it, red as a post box. She had sketched it on a beer mat: the cat's head at the top right, one eye half shut, whiskers drawn as three quick strokes. I heated and bent the tube, heated and bent, until my thumbs blistered and the glass went from orange to the colour of cherries.

The cat, who had never once been fed by me, came to the bench to watch. When I switched the transformer on at dusk, the line lit along the black backboard with a faint hum, and the cat stood up and walked straight into the middle of the heart as though it had been measured for her. Maggie cried a little and said the cat was called Pilot and had belonged to her late husband, who used to drink in there with the door propped open for the sea air.

Maggie hung the sign above the bar that week. Every evening after closing, the cat sleeps in the window beneath it, warm from the tubes. The town calls her the Lantern's cat now. I take my tea across the road so I can see the sign from the workshop, and I count it the only piece of work I have made that I still pass with a nod.