Split image: a grey cat with orange eyes on the left, and a geometric black and grey cat face tattoo with orange eyes on skin on the right.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric cat face beside a photo of a grey cat

Geometric · Mixed · Photo

The left panel shows a close photograph of a grey cat with large orange eyes, held by someone whose body is only partly visible. The right panel shows a cat face tattoo built from angular black linework and grey shading, with small orange eyes and a similar outline to the photographed cat. The tattoo sits on a plain, evenly lit area of skin, and the two panels are set side by side against a black border.

Geometric Cat Cat face

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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

The grey cat came through the checkpoint lane at twenty past six, riding in a wicker basket on the lap of a man who kept apologising to the queue behind him. Nobody apologises to a border officer unless they have something to hide, so I looked at the cat first. It stared back over the rim of the basket with two orange eyes, the only warm colour in a morning the colour of wet slate.

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The papers were in order: a pet passport, a microchip number, a vaccination stamp from a vet in Ghent. The man said the cat was called Sextant, a name his sister had chosen because the animal always seemed to know which way was north. I did not quite believe him, but I believed the cat. It turned its head in three clean movements, like someone folding paper, and the angles of its face were so exact I wanted to measure them with a ruler.

Halfway through the paperwork his voice cracked. The chip was registered to a woman in Leith, not to him. She had died in February. The cat had sat on her chest for two days before anyone came, and her brother had promised to take it back to the coast where she grew up. I asked for the death certificate. He had it folded inside his coat, soft as cloth from handling. I stamped the passport and handed it back without a word.

After they had gone I stood in the cold with the lane lights humming and found I was drawing the cat in my head: a triangle for each ear, a diamond for the forehead, two amber lamps set into the grey. Some crossings stay with you as lines rather than fur, sharp and patient, watching the road ahead as if it had already chosen the way.