Black ink drawing of a cat skull with stippled shading above a single open eye, on a plain light background, shown as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat skull and eye design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed drawing of an animal skull, likely a cat, with the eye sockets, nasal cavity and teeth shaded with fine dots and short strokes. A single eye with a pointed lower outline sits beneath the skull, with the composition centred on a plain light background. The image is entirely black ink on paper, with no colour.

Dotwork Skull Eye Animal

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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

The skull is in the rhubarb bed on the first frost, bleached at the cheekbones and packed with dark earth in both sockets, its teeth still set in that narrow, unbothered grin. You crouch with the fork in your hand and do not touch it for a long time. The rhubarb leaves are going soft and yellow at the edges, and the back gate is open the way you left it.

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Mrs Pearce from number nine leans over the fence in her dressing gown and says it is Tibs, gone since August, and that the cat had a habit of sitting on the wall at four in the afternoon and watching the whole terrace as if it were paying rent. 'He saw things,' she says. 'Nobody ever asked him what.' You say you will take it to the council, and she laughs in a way that suggests she has tried that already.

You bury the skull under the damson tree and pat the soil flat with the heel of your boot. By morning the earth has been turned back in a neat circle and the skull sits on the flagstones by the kitchen door, facing the glass. Pressed into the hollow where it was, half-buried, is a marble of pale glass with a dark iris and a lower lid drawn to a point, sharp as a stitch. It is warm when you pick it up, or you tell yourself it is the sun.

You put it in your coat pocket and walk to the bus stop without looking back at the house. A pigeon watches you from the shelter roof with the same flat patience. When you reach into your pocket the marble has rolled into the seam, and when you press it between finger and thumb it turns, slowly, to face you.