Black linework drawing of a cat head with a feather headdress, pearl necklace, gem and bow, a neo-traditional tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat head with feathers and pearls

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A cat's face in profile-like three-quarter view wears a plumed feather headdress, a strand of pearls with a central gem, and a lace-style ruff. A bow with a small gem sits at the lower right, with scrolling ornamental swirls around the outline. The design uses bold black outlines with finer interior detail and a faint pink wash in the feathers and bow.

Neo-trad Cat Feather Pearl Gem Bow Headdress Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The mill cat would not come in from the yard until she had her hat on. Nobody remembered who had first pinned the feather to her head, only that it had been a hard January and the grain was low. Ada Penrose, who kept the farm at Low Ashgrove, found the cat sitting on the gatepost one dawn with a moulted pheasant plume tucked behind one ear and a string of blue glass beads round her neck, as if she had been to a christening and come home early.

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The beads had been her mother's. Ada had buried them in the tin under the stairs the winter the thaw failed, and nobody had dug them up since. Her brother Tom said the cat had dragged them out with her teeth. Ada said nothing, because the cat had also left the tin open, and the cat had never once in six years wanted a thing she did not already have.

At Candlemas the snow came up to the windowsills. The lane was shut, the hens stopped laying, and the cat walked down the middle of the kitchen with her ruff stiff with frost and a bow of black ribbon at her throat. She stood between Ada and the stove, then went to the door and sat, waiting. Tom grumbled, but he took the lantern and followed her out across the white field to the old byre, where a ewe had gone down in the drift with two lambs coming wrong.

They got the lambs out before dawn. When Ada looked back at the wall, the feather had come loose and lay on the snow, and the cat was gone. Ada picked it up and kept it in the tin with the beads. Every January after, the tin was opened, and there was always one more lamb than the ewes had carried.