Four identical solid black cat head designs with white linework for the eyes, ears, whiskers and muzzle, arranged in a two by two grid on a white background.

Four black cat head designs on a sheet

Traditional · Black and grey · Flash

The image shows four matching cat head illustrations arranged in a two by two grid on a white background. Each cat has a solid black silhouette with a jagged, furred outline, and white detailing for the ears, eyes, nose, whiskers and mouth. The design is flat and graphic, with no shading or gradients, and uses only black and white.

Traditional Cat Black cat Cat head Whiskers Flash sheet

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The black cat came up the gangway of the Mary Ellen Sayers on the morning the coal barge sank, and nobody aboard could say whose cat it was. Ada Penhallow, who kept the lamp in the chandlery at Shields, swore it had been sitting on the bollard for three tides, washing its face and watching the water as if it were waiting for a bill to be settled. The men called it a bad omen and fed it their fish heads anyway.

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When the Sayers finally limped home with her hull stove in on one side, the cat walked off the gangway without looking back and went straight to the window of the Lamplighter's back room, where Ada's brother Tom was lying with a fever and a bottle of gin nobody had opened. The cat jumped up onto the sill and sat there, black and furred as a bad winter, its white eyes fixed on him.

Tom did not die that week. He told the doctor it was the cat, and the doctor wrote something down and said nothing. Ada said the cat had only wanted a warm sill, which was true, though she never said it wasn't also something else. The cat stayed three years, then one April it went back down the gangway the way it had come, and nobody saw it leave.

Tom kept the gin unopened on the shelf above the till, and he never once looked at the window without touching his cap.