Fine line drawing of cat whiskers meeting at a small solid black heart on a white background, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Cat whiskers with a small heart

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

Three thin black lines fan out on each side of a small solid heart at the centre, forming a pair of cat whiskers. The linework is even and delicate, with no shading. The design is shown in isolation on a plain white background, with plenty of space around it.

Fine line Cat Whiskers Heart

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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 hear the cat before you see it, a thin complaint from behind the bins at the back of the all-night launderette on Cheetham Hill Road. The rain has stopped, but the pavements still hold the orange glow of the sodium lamps, and you are already late. The parcel you were meant to drop at the bakery is damp through the satchel strap. You crouch anyway. Two green eyes look back at you from a ginger face with a splash of white at the throat, as if someone dipped it in milk.

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It doesn't run. It walks to the edge of the light with its tail held straight up, and stops. Its whiskers are stiff and dark, fanning out on either side of its nose like the spokes of a fan. Your gran always said a cat's whiskers are a ruler for gaps, and that a cat will never squeeze somewhere its whiskers can't follow. This one seems to be measuring you, and deciding that you will do.

You carry it in a cardboard box to the twenty-four hour vet on Oxford Road. A sleepy nurse called Priya runs a scanner over its shoulders and finds no chip. Nobody claims it. You sit in the waiting room while the clock above the desk ticks past three and the courier label on your satchel slowly dries to a pale grey smear.

Before you leave, Priya parts the fur at the cat's neck and shows you a small brass tag shaped like a heart, worn smooth at the edges. The name on it is Maud. The phone number has its last digit rubbed away. You ring the remaining digits from the front step as the sky greys over the Ardwick rooftops, and a woman answers on the tenth ring. Maud, she says, has been gone since the winter the trams stopped running. You look down at the box, where two green eyes are watching you and the whiskers are still there, black and fine, pointing at the door as if to ask what kept you.