Colour traditional tattoo of a cat wearing a flowered hat and bow tie within an ornate oval frame, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat in flowered hat on thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A cat's face wears a hat decorated with pink and white flowers, a bow and a feather, and a bow tie sits beneath it. The design is enclosed in a scalloped oval frame with bold black outlines. Red, blue, yellow and orange ink dominate against the pale skin, and the tattoo fills the frame of the photo.

Traditional Thigh Cat Hat Flower Bow tie Feather Frame

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

Nobody on the Calder wharves could say when the cat first put on the hat. Mabel had come aboard the narrowboat Patience as a kitten in a coal sack, and by spring she would not sit in the cabin without her finery: a straw hat stitched with pink and white blossoms, a black ribbon bow, and a feather that old Eli swore had come off a jay. On Sundays she wore a red bow tie as well, tied by his wife with fingers that shook a little more each year.

Keep reading

The river took the Patience in the March floods. The water ran brown and fast past the mill weir, and Eli had the tiller in one hand and a lantern in the other when the mooring rope parted. The boat swung side on. The cabin door burst open. Mabel went under the coal boards with her ears flat, and the hat went somewhere in the dark, though nobody saw it come loose.

Three days later a lock-keeper's boy at Cromwell Bottom pulled a sodden straw thing out of the reeds. He carried it up to the lock house out of decency, and when he turned it over in his hands the flowers were still pink.

Eli found the cat on the cabin roof in the thin spring sunshine, the boat tied under the willows, sitting very upright with her bow tie straight. She looked at him as though he had been late. He took the hat from the boy, dried it on his knee, and set it on her head, and she let him. That is the whole of the story Eli told afterwards, to anyone who asked why the cat was never seen without her hat.