Ink drawing of a cat face with a large bow on its ear, with tribal-style swirls and dotted shading filling one side of the head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat head with bow and tribal swirl pattern

Black and grey · Flash

A cat face in a cartoon style, with a large bow above the right ear and a small nose and whiskers. The left side of the head is filled with dense tribal-style swirls, wave lines, triangles and dotted shading, while the right side stays mostly open with light hatching. The drawing is in dark ink on a yellowish, vignetted background, with the filter giving it a warm, aged look.

Cat Cat face Bow Tribal pattern Swirl Whiskers Triangle Dotwork

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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 abbot came down the scriptorium steps on the feast of Saint Edith with his sleeves pushed back, and you had only just finished the cat. It sat in the lower margin of the Fenmoor psalter, beside the thirty-first psalm, where any sensible copyist would have left plain vine scroll. You had given it a bow the size of a folded sail and tail swirls as fine as the initials Brother Osric had spent a week on. The ink was still wet on the whiskers.

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Abbot Hildric bent over the lectern and looked for a long time. The cat looked back with one eye narrowed, which was your doing and not something you had planned. 'Whose beast is this?' he asked. You said nothing, because the honest answer was that it had come from your pen during matins while the others sang, and you were not certain you had been fully awake.

He ordered the leaf scraped. Brother Osric, who had lost the most time to your idleness, fetched the pumice himself, then stopped with it raised. 'The swirls are better than mine,' he said grudgingly. The abbot's jaw worked for a while. In the end the cat was allowed to stay, on condition that nothing else would be drawn in the margins of the Gospels until Lent was over.

So you keep to the plain borders now, and the cat stays where it is, its small nose turned up at every reader who reaches the thirty-first psalm. When the novices stop to admire it, you do not correct them. Let them think a monk meant it, you tell yourself. Let them wonder what sort of man keeps a cat with a bow in his prayers.