Back of a woman's neck showing a small fine line black cat outline tattoo, with a tabby cat resting on her shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fine line cat tattoo on the nape

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small black outline of a seated cat sits at the base of the neck, drawn with thin, even linework and no shading. The ink is solid black with no colour, and the tattoo is framed by loose hair pinned up at the back of the head. A tabby cat rests on the subject's left shoulder, and the warm, soft-focus background of striped curtains fills the rest of the frame.

Fine line Neck Cat Silhouette Tabby cat

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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

At Corbel Street market the rain came in off the river at half past nine and didn't stop, so my stall of stencils and brass lettering was the only one still lit. I had my cutting knife, a sheet of clear acetate and Pilot, my grey tabby, asleep on the mat where I needed to work.

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A woman from the bakery across the road came under my awning with her hood up and asked for a cat for her window. Not a big one, she said. Something you could see from the bus. I told her a cat is hard to cut in one line, because the tail has to come back round to the paw and every time you lift the knife you lose the animal. She said she didn't mind a bit of cheating.

I cut it sitting, the way Pilot sits when he has decided not to move: haunches down, tail wrapped round the front feet, head turned as if he'd heard his name from another room. The knife made no sound on the card. When I lifted the sheet the cat came away whole, one unbroken edge. Pilot opened one eye, saw his own shape cut out of the card, sniffed at it and looked unimpressed.

The baker paid me in a bag of day-old rolls and a promise to bring the window back when the rain stopped. Pilot stepped through the hole in the stencil as if it were a door, then sat down inside it on the wet step. Water ran off the edge of the awning and round the outline of the two of us, and for a while nobody on Corbel Street could tell which of us was the drawing.