Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a cat skull with whiskers on the back of a person's neck.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat skull tattoo on the back of the neck

Dotwork · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A cat skull is drawn in black linework with stippled dotwork shading, showing the ears, empty eye sockets, nose cavity and teeth. The eye sockets are filled with dense black dots, while the skull bones are shaded in lighter grey stipple. The design is centred on the back of the neck, with the subject's hair pulled up above it.

Dotwork Neck Cat Skull Animal skull Whiskers Teeth

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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

You stop the van forty miles past the last petrol station because something pale lies in the gravel at the edge of the road, and you know bone when you see it. It is a cat's skull, picked so clean the wind has polished it, its ears still upright like two folded letters. You kneel and turn it over in your hands. The eye sockets are deep and dark, and the teeth are small and yellow, sharp as the edge of a comb.

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The tin under your passenger seat already holds forty-one skulls, each wrapped in a page from the Tucson Gazette. You have never sold one to a buyer who asked where it came from. The dealers in Phoenix pay by weight and do not ask questions, and you have learned to nod along. But this one has a hairline crack across the brow, mended with glue by someone patient, someone who kept the cat indoors and loved it enough to repair what the desert had started. You wonder who that was.

By dusk the heat has drained out of the road and the stars are coming through like pinholes in black card. At a diner in Quartzsite a waitress asks what you are carrying. You tell her a cat. She says her grandmother had a tabby called Juniper who went out one night and came back every night for a month, always to the same step, and then stopped coming. You do not ask her what she means. You pay for the coffee and do not look at the seat beside you.

When you reach your flat in Tucson the tin is already open on the passenger seat, the lid propped up and the skull turned to face the windscreen, the way a cat sits when it wants to be let in.