Black ink tattoo of a cat with one blue eye, set inside an ornate scrolled frame on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat in ornate frame on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A cat's head in profile sits inside an ornate scrolled frame with foliage and flourishes. The linework is bold and dark, with fine hatching and shading in the fur and frame, and the cat's eye is the only area of colour, a pale blue. The tattoo fills the centre of the image on the side of the torso, with a hand resting on the skin above it and a red garment at the edge of the frame.

Ribs Cat Frame Scroll Foliage Flourish Eye

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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

Mr Gallagher swore the cat came with the building, the way the damp did and the brass rail along the bar. Nobody could say where it slept. By the time the band struck up for the last waltz it would be on the cloakroom ledge, grey as dishwater, watching the coats go up on their hooks with the look of a man checking another man's accounts.

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The frame was the cat's other half. It hung above my hatch, a great oval of gilt scrolls and curling acanthus, too heavy for the wall and too grand for the hall. Inside it was an empty square of cracked glass that gave back the dancers in pieces. The cat never once sat in the glass. It sat beneath the frame and looked up at it the way a clerk looks at a clock, as if waiting for something to be decided.

In March the landlord sold the fittings to a man from Harrogate. He came with a van and a tape measure, and I helped him lift the frame down. The moment it left the wall the cat jumped off the ledge, sniffed at the bare plaster, and sat squarely in the pale shape the frame had left behind, one blue eye fixed on nothing at all.

The next night I hung my coat on the hook beside the hatch and went back to counting tickets. When the last waltz ended, the cat was still there, tail curled round its feet, sitting inside a rectangle of wall that no longer held anything.