Traditional style colour tattoo of a black and white cat wearing a red collar with a bell, above a red flower and dark leaves, on the upper arm.

Cat with bell collar and flower on arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A cat's head with orange eyes, a pink nose and white whiskers is shown in the centre, wearing a red collar with a brass bell. A red five-petalled flower with a dark centre and dark green and black leaves sits beneath it, and a partial star tattoo appears at the bottom edge. Bold black outlines define the shapes, with flat colour fills in black, grey, red, orange and teal.

Traditional Upper arm Cat Collar Bell Flower Leaves Star

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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 wind's getting into the stones. You hear that? That's the bell. Nobody on this road ever owned the cat who wears it, not the caravan men, not the water clerk at Sarrat, and certainly not the cat. She came out of the dust the summer the well went salt, a black cat with white at her chin and a red ribbon at her throat, and a brass bell that rang every time she turned her head.

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The old road ran between three dead towns, and travellers there had a habit of walking off the wrong way at dusk. Lamps guttered, mules sat down, men began hearing their own names called from the dunes. The cat would walk out ahead with her tail up, and the bell would ring and ring until the lost ones turned their faces toward the sound and followed it home. Nobody paid her. She took a dried fish from the kitchen of the first inn and asked for nothing more.

One night a tax collector in a grey coat came through with a hired guide and a sack of coins. He laughed at the bell. A thing that loud, he said, would be easy to find, and he meant to sell the brass. He worked the collar off her neck by the cistern while the guide slept, and he tucked it into his coat.

In the morning there were a hundred rough tracks circling his camp, and the collar lying in the sand at his feet, still humming faintly. Some say the cat never came back. I say the next traveller who crosses the flat ground past the three towns will hear a bell where no bell should be, and if they follow it, they reach water. Keep your eyes on the sound and not on your own feet. That's the whole of the trick.