Black and grey shaded feline skull tattoo with two fangs on the calf, outlined with a thin teal edge.

Feline skull tattoo on a calf

Realism · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A shaded skull resembling a cat or similar animal, shown in profile with a rounded cranium, a prominent eye socket and two fangs at the jaw. The linework is soft and the shading builds up depth across the bone, with lighter highlights and darker recesses. A faint teal or green edge surrounds the design, and the skull sits on the back of a hairy calf against a cluttered, paint-splattered floor.

Realism Calf Skull Animal skull Fangs Teeth

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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

Dear Mags, the rain has not let up since Tuesday and the stall under the iron arch leaks onto the good tin trays, so I have moved everything that matters into the back room with the gas ring. You will laugh, but the cat skull came in on Thursday. A man with a wet dog and a wetter cap brought it in a biscuit tin, wrapped in a Bradford Telegraph from 1958, and asked two pounds for it. I said the bone was too thin to be worth the paper. He said it had been a tom from the lock-keeper's cottage and had caught rats until the day it didn't. I gave him the two pounds anyway, because the skull had such a tired, knowing look, the way a cat looks at you from a windowsill when you have come home late.

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I have set it on the shelf above the scales. Its one good eye is a dark smudge where the socket has gone soft with age, and the fangs are still there, two little hooks at the jaw, which is more than most of the customers have. Mr Okafor from the fish stall came to look at it yesterday and said he would give me a fiver if I cleaned off the green dust. I told him the green dust was the only honest thing about it.

I think I will keep it. Tonight, when the market shutters are down and the rain drums on the arch, I will sit with it and the gas ring and try to remember what the old lock-keeper used to call the cat. Something short, I think. Something you could shout across a towpath. Write soon, and tell Dad to stop sending me the rain forecasts, I can see the sky from here perfectly well.