Black and grey geometric cat head tattoo with dotwork shading on the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric cat head on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cat's head in profile, built from angular facets and triangles with bold outlines. Dense stippled dotwork fills the shading on the cheeks, nose and ears, while long whiskers extend below the face. The design is in black ink only and sits across the forearm against a dark background.

Geometric Dotwork Forearm Cat Cat head Whiskers

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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

Sit still, you, and let me get the lamp right. No, the sea doesn't care if you fidget. The carpenter on the Halcyon Jane was a man called Oswin Pike, and he could not look at anything without seeing the angles in it. Cups were prisms to him. Gulls were kites of folded paper. When the cook's cat came aboard at Valparaiso, thin as a rope and mean with it, Oswin studied her face and said it was all planes and points. Nobody believed him until the fog.

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It came down on us off the Horn in the third week of June, thick as wet wool, and the captain had us heave to because we could not see the bowsprit. Oswin sat on the hatch with a stick of chalk and drew that cat's head on the deck planking, every facet cut clean, every line running straight to a point. Then he said the cat would lead us. The cat, who had never once led anything but a mouse to its death, hopped onto the rail, turned her head into the wind and held it there, ears like two sharp pyramids. Her whiskers stood out past the bow like the tines of a rake, and when the spray hit them she flinched only to settle again.

The mate laughed until Oswin pointed out that the whiskers were angled toward the reef, not the open sea. We put the helm over. The cat did not blink once while we ran past the black teeth of rock, close enough to hear them drinking.

Oswin never finished that drawing. He said the last facet was the one you could only see from the water. I still keep the chalk outline in my coat pocket. Here, look, but mind the edges. Every point of it is pointing home.