Pencilled neo-traditional tattoo design on paper showing a cat's head, a large rose, mandala-style flowers, a butterfly and a fan motif, with no body placement shown.

Cat, rose and mandala tattoo design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tattoo design on white paper, showing a cat's head in profile beside a large rose and two mandala-style flowers. A butterfly, a fanned arch and scrollwork frame the composition, and a spider web pattern sits behind the lower flowers. Bold black outlines are combined with soft grey pencil shading on the rose, the flowers and the cat's face.

Neo-trad Cat Rose Mandala Flower Butterfly Fan Scrollwork Web

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

The cat had claimed the cutting table the morning the Bristol lorry delivered the wrong order, and by Whitsun nobody in Little Wenning had found the nerve to move her. Mrs Harrow said she was a cross from the Hendersons' farm, though the Hendersons swore she had walked out of the hedgerow. Ada Pruett, who had worked the counter at Harrow's since she was fifteen, called her Mab and fed her the heels of the Sunday loaf when the till drawer was shut.

Keep reading

Mab had opinions about the window. Every morning she watched a spider spin between the sash and the card of lace-edged cotton reels, and every morning the spider rebuilt what the wind had torn. Ada envied that. Her aunt's letter had come in March, offering a room above a milliner's in Leeds, and Ada had bought the coach ticket on Thursday. It sat folded inside her glove on the shelf under the till, and Mab had taken to lying on the glove as if it were a hot-water bottle.

On the last Friday, Mrs Harrow came through from the back carrying a hatbox tied with string. Inside, wrapped in tissue, was a paper fan her husband had brought home from Shanghai before the war, its spokes painted with rosebuds and a border of tiny scalloped arches. Ada had never seen it opened. She lifted it out and let it fall open in the light from the window. The spokes threw a fan of shadow across the counter, and in the middle of it the cat stood, stretched, and stepped off the glove onto the ticket, claws catching the fold.

Ada missed the Saturday coach. She worked the ticket free of Mab's claws, pinned the fan above the till, and asked Mrs Harrow whether the room in Leeds would still be waiting next spring. It would not, Mrs Harrow said. But the cat would.