Black and grey dotwork and linework tattoo of a cat skull with a crescent moon above it and a lotus shape below, on bare skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat skull with crescent moon and lotus

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A cat skull is drawn in clean outline with a crescent moon above its brow, and a lotus-like shape of petals sits beneath it. The skull is mostly left as light skin with fine black linework, while the eye sockets, nasal area and petal shading are built from dense stippled dots. Solid black fills on some petals add contrast, and the design is centred in the frame against plain skin.

Dotwork Blackwork Other Skull Crescent moon Lotus Mandala Animal skull Petal

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the sawdust, it gets in the teeth. Nobody left in Pellow's Travelling Show remembers the big top's last proper season, but the cat remembers, and the cat is long gone, so you'll have to take my word for it.

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Her name was Marisol, though the bills said Madame Lune's Silver Tabby. She could walk the high wire with a brass bell round her neck and never once look down. When the crowds thinned to a dozen farmhands and a wet Tuesday, she still climbed the ladder to the platform, because the moon was up over the car park and she believed it was owed a turn.

The ringmaster, Ansel Crewe, had sold the elephants in March and the horses in June. By autumn he was selling the lamps. The night the canvas finally split along its seam, he came to the caravan with a bottle and a ledger and said, Marisol is worth more to the knacker than to me. Old Dorrie, who had mended harnesses for forty years, took the ledger from his hands, read it by lamplight, and said nothing. She put the cat in a wicker basket and drove north before dawn with the windows down so the cold would keep the cat awake.

What became of the cat is the part I like best. Dorrie buried her beneath a ring of river stones at the edge of a field nobody ever sold, and by the following spring the stones had grown over with pale flowers nobody had planted. Ansel came looking for his ledger and found only a crescent moon scratched into the gatepost, and a scrap of paper pinned beneath it that read, the tent is down, the cat has the ground now. And that, friends, is why you never buy a ticket to a show that sells its moon.