Black and grey dotwork and fine line tattoo of a cat skull with whiskers above the word WILDCATS and a swash underline, on a limb.

Cat skull with Wildcats lettering

Dotwork · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A skull with pointed cat ears and whisker lines sits above the word WILDCATS in capitals, with a looping swash line beneath. The skull is shaded with stippled dots and fine outlines, and the lettering is crisp black linework. The piece is in black ink and greys, centred on a plain skin background with a blurred dark backdrop.

Dotwork Fine line Other Skull Cat Whiskers Lettering Swash

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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

Dai Probert never let anyone forget that the Wildcats were his idea. In the spring of 1971 the committee of the Nantglas Welfare sat in a fug of Woodbine smoke arguing over a name for the new colliery football side, and Dai, who had a bad back and a worse temper, took a shift roster off the wall and drew a cat's head on the back of it. Its face was a skull. The men laughed, then went quiet, because everyone knew about Tiger, the pit cat who had kept the lower levels clear of rats for eleven years before a fall of stone took her in the Gwyn seam.

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I was fourteen the summer I found that drawing in his shed, pinned between a calendar from the Co-op and a jar of rusted nails. He was dead by then, and the pit was a car park with a pound shop on the corner. I took the sheet to the print works on Station Road, where a man with reading glasses on a cord made me a stencil and a fresh kit, black shirts with a grey skull across the chest. He asked what the words underneath meant. I said it was just the team name. He said that wasn't what he'd asked.

On the last Saturday before the gates were chained, we played on the rec in those shirts with the rain coming sideways off the tip. Nobody scored. At half time Dai's widow handed out oranges and told us to stop looking so miserable, and I pulled the swash line on my own shirt straight with my thumb, the way he'd shown me, so its tail curled out past the lettering as if it still had somewhere to go.