Black ink drawing of a cougar face inside a circle with a hexagon and dashed construction lines, shown as a tattoo flash design.

Cougar head in a circle and hexagon

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed black ink drawing of a cougar's face, viewed head on, with fine stippled and hatched shading across the fur, ears and muzzle. The head sits inside a thin circle, with a hexagon and dashed geometric construction lines drawn around it. The drawing is monochrome on a cream background, with the centred composition giving a symmetrical, emblem-like look.

Geometric Dotwork Big cat Animal head Hexagon Circle Geometric line

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fairground lorries have been parked on the common since Tuesday, and the big top's guy ropes hum whenever the wind comes off the estuary. You have been sent to fetch the brass dividers from the back of Mr Vell's booth before the rain, because he never lets anyone else touch them. The booth smells of paraffin and tallow. On the wall hangs his chart, a circle with a six-sided shape pressed inside it, and dashed lines reaching past its corners like spokes on a wheel that has lost its hub.

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"Take the cat with you," he says, without looking up. The cat is a painted board the show carries from town to town, a slab of pale wood that the strongman's daughter once used for knife-throwing. Its face is built from stipple and hatching, grey and brown, with eyes that seem to follow the lamp. Mr Vell insists the lines are not decoration. Every corner of the hexagon touches the circle, and every big cat the old shows ever kept was fixed to its frame by that same proportion, so none could ever slip its rig.

You carry the board out into the dark. Halfway across the common the dodgem lights go out one by one, and something moves along the hedgerow, low and patient, keeping pace with you. You hold the dividers up like a lantern. The creature stops at the edge of the light, its eyes catching the gleam, and you understand what he meant. The lines were never a cage for the cat. They were the way it found its road home.

In the morning the board is leaning against the caravan steps, and the hedge is empty. On Mr Vell's chart a seventh dashed line has been drawn, running out past the circle and off the edge of the paper, and he is already folding the tent.