Black and grey stipple flash drawing of a cat in a feathered top hat, smoking a pipe and wearing a bow tie and lace collar.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat in feathered top hat with pipe

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A cat with wide eyes wears a tall top hat with a curled feather and smokes a pipe, with a bow tie and a frilled lace collar below its face. The design is built from dense stippling and fine hatched lines on a cream background, with shading concentrated on the hat brim, ears and collar. The drawing is shown flat and centred with no colour, so it reads as a standalone tattoo design.

Dotwork Cat Top hat Feather Pipe Bow tie

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bill at the Gaiety Palais had promised a Professor Mollington and his Dancing Tom, but by the time the house lights dimmed on Thursday, the only creature on the boards was a ginger-grey cat in a tall silk hat, a bow tie knotted tight under his chin and a lace collar frilled out like a cake doily. Nobody in the Ardwick stalls could say who had taught him to waltz. Mrs Pilling, who swept the stage each night, swore the cat had been sitting on the piano stool since Monday, pipe unlit, staring at the footlights as if they owed him money.

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He went through his routine without a stumble. He lifted the feather from the hat brim with one paw, bowed to the empty circle, then took the pipe from his teeth and blew a ring of smoke that hung above the orchestra pit and would not disperse. The conductor, a nervous man named Gerald Vosper, kept his baton raised and waited for the cat to nod. When it finally did, the band struck up the Blue Danube so fast the cornet player dropped his mute.

Afterwards, Vosper found the hat on the stage floor, feather bent, and beneath it a single card in neat copperplate: Mollington has gone to Blackpool. Pay the tom his wages. The wages were a saucer of cream and a sixpence, and the sixpence was still warm when Mrs Pilling picked it up. The cat was nowhere to be seen, but on Friday the ticket office sold out again, and the bill, for the first time in the Gaiety's history, read simply: Tom, Who Leads.