Black and grey flash design of a cat's face inside an ornate heart-shaped border of dots and lace-like linework, with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat face in an ornate heart frame

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A drawn tattoo design on paper showing a cat's face with large eyes, shaded in greys with fine hatching on the fur. The cat sits within a heart-shaped frame edged with dotted lines, spiked points and scrolling ornament above. The shading is black and grey, and the composition is symmetrical and centred on the page.

Dotwork Neo-trad Cat Cat face Heart Ornament Lace Frame Scroll

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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 mason had left his chisels on the chapel step, and the grey cat had spent all morning sitting on them as if they were warm. I lifted her off by the scruff, the way my mother did, and she went straight back up, eyes fixed on the carved heart above the door of Hollin Keep. Nobody had worshipped there since the roof came in. The stone lace still held, though, dotted and spiked and scrolling round a hollow no bigger than a hand.

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She pressed her paw to a loose panel at the centre and kept pushing until the mortar gave with a crack like a dry twig. Behind it sat a tin box wrapped in oilcloth, the kind sailors used for letters. I carried it down the hill without opening it, because the cat walked ahead of me the whole way with her tail straight up, as if she were the one who had found it.

Inside was a single folded sheet from my great-uncle Thomas, who had shipped out of Whitby in 1911 and promised to come back for the keep's last cat. The letter was short and badly spelt. He wrote that he had drawn her so he would not forget, and in the margin was a face with round watchful eyes, whiskers running off the paper, a heart wrapped around her like a shawl. It was the same face as the one above the door, only younger.

The mason read it twice at his bench, then turned a chisel over in his hands. 'Shall we cut it again?' he asked. 'Her face, inside the heart, the way he drew it.' I said yes before I could think about the cost, and the cat, who had heard none of this, climbed onto the chisels and closed her eyes.