Black and grey traditional style tattoo of a cat's head with feathered detail below, on the upper arm of a person in a dark sleeve.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat head on an upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A bold black and grey cat head with pointed ears, wide eyes and a striped forehead fills most of the frame. Below it, a feathered shape with dotted shading sits on the skin, drawn with heavy outlines and solid black fills. The photograph is monochrome, with the tattoo on the upper arm against a plain pale background and a dark sleeve at the edge.

Traditional Upper arm Cat Feather

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

"Keep your hands in your pockets and listen, because I will not tell it twice in this weather," said Nan Pelham, shaking the rain from her headscarf over the crowd at Shudd Lane market. "The cat in this story was called Gurn, and he was the only cat in the town with a stripe across his forehead like a judge's ribbon. His eyes went wide when he was pleased and wider when he was not, and mostly he was not."

Keep reading

She tapped the wet trestle with one knuckle. "One October a magpie called Odette came down off the chapel roof with a grey feather in her beak, and she dropped it right at the feet of Gurn, who was sitting on the butcher's step guarding the offal. Gurn did not care for magpies. He cared for feathers even less. But he picked it up, because nobody had ever told him he couldn't, and he carried it all the way up the hill to the bell tower, where the ropes hang like old men's braces."

"Now the bell-ringer, Mr Halloran, had a cough that could stop a clock, and he found the cat asleep on his coiled rope with the feather under one paw. He reached for the cat, and Gurn opened one eye, and then the other, wider than any cat should. Mr Halloran sat down on the step and laughed until he wept, and he never did ring the noon bell again without first asking permission."

Nan pulled her coat tight and looked up at the grey sky. "Odette came back the next day for her feather and found the cat wearing it like a hat, so they made a bargain. Gurn kept one feather a year, and Odette kept his name in her chatter. So if you hear a magpie scolding at dusk, look up at the chapel wall. There he is, watching the square with a feather under his paw and his eyes gone wide."