Pencil and ink drawings of a dotwork geometric cat head with a triangle and a cross with blackletter lettering, shown as tattoo design sketches.

Geometric cat head and cross designs

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

The collage shows a sphynx-style cat head drawn in fine dotwork and linework, with a mandala-like floral crown on its head, a dotted triangle below the chin and a small dotted triangle above. A separate black and white stencil-style design shows a cross with bone shapes and stylised blackletter letters. Everything is shown in black and grey on pale paper or a plain background.

Dotwork Geometric Cat Cross Mandala Flower Triangle Diamond Bone Lettering

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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 cats of Lenmoor were forbidden the mapmakers' vault, which the grey one ignored every morning. It was hairless and wrinkled, with a crown of painted petals across its brow, and the chief cartographer, Hesketh, said it had come up from the drowned quarter in a fishing net the year the sea took the lower wards. He called it Mercy, and said it sat on the one chart that mattered.

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That chart was the harbour sheet, a vellum with a diamond set above the shoals and a second triangle pointing down at the reef like a chin. Every ship that left Lenmoor carried a copy, and every ship that had wrecked had carried one too. Oda began to suspect the lines were wrong by exactly the width of a cat's paw. She measured them three nights running with brass dividers while Mercy watched from the corner of the table, eyes half shut, unbothered by the lamp.

On the fourth night the cat would not leave the chart, so Oda lifted it. The sheet beneath was no vellum at all but a stencil of a cross with bones for crossbars, the lettering cut so fine she had to tilt it to the light. The names were the drowned. Each one had been pricked through the paper in tiny dots, the way a needle works ink into skin, and each dot was a soul that had been counted once and then forgotten.

She did not burn the stencil. She pricked a ring of new dots around the reef and drew the true line of the shoals in pencil beside the old one. When the morning bell rang, Mercy stretched, stepped off the table, and sat down on the fresh triangle as though it had been waiting for it all along.