Pen and dotwork drawing on paper of three cat designs: two skulls and a hairless sphynx cat head, with black drawing pens beside them.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat skulls and sphynx cat flash sheet

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows three cat designs drawn in black ink: a skull with large eye sockets and fangs at the top, a hairless sphynx cat head in the lower left, and a smaller skull in the lower right. The linework is fine and outlined, with stippled dotwork shading in the eye sockets, ears and around the jaws. The drawings are in black ink on a cream sheet, with two black drawing pens lying across the upper right corner.

Dotwork Cat Skull Sphynx cat Animal skull Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The night the bells stopped in Sallow Quay, Edith Vane went down to the old chandlery with a lantern and a sack of salt, because her grandmother had said that when the cats of the town turned their faces to the wall, somebody had to go and count them. The chandlery cellar smelled of tar and wet rope. Along the shelves, where the herring barrels had been, the cats sat in a row, hairless and grey-pink as boiled ham, their great ears folded back like the wings of moths settling. None of them moved when her lantern swung across them. Their eyes were open, though, and every one of them was turned towards the far wall, where someone had chalked a door that had not been there that morning.

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She counted nine. The tenth place on the shelf was bare, and beside it lay a small skull with its jaw dropped open, the way a kitten's skull looks when a fox has been at it, its eye sockets dusted with the same fine grey stipple as the cats' ears. Edith understood, the way you understand a debt, that the skull had been a cat once, and that the tenth cat had gone through the chalk door to see what was on the other side. She had heard the bells stop. She had heard them stop because the tenth cat had been the one that rang them.

She sat down on the barrel-stave step and waited, salt in her lap, until the lantern guttered. Then she set the first grain of salt on the bare shelf, the way her grandmother had taught her, and the nearest cat, slowly, as if it had remembered something important, got up and walked through the chalk door. The bells in Sallow Quay began again at dawn, one short and one long, and nobody in the town could say who had rung them.