Geometric linework cat head tattoo with grey shading and red accents on the shoulder of a woman seen from behind.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric cat head on a shoulder

Geometric · Shoulder · Mixed · Photo

A cat's head is built from angular geometric facets outlined in fine black lines, with the eyes and nose picked out in shaded greys. Patches of muted red fill a few of the facets on the upper head, while the rest is left in grey and black. The tattoo sits on the upper back shoulder, with a black tank top and a raised hand with a bracelet at the edge of the frame.

Geometric Shoulder Cat Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The master wanted the cat round. Round, he said, the way the old moulds had them, soft as bread dough and easy to glaze. Tamit sat at the bench with the copper cutting wire in her fist and a lump of grey faience still warm from the kiln, and she did not argue. She only turned the cat's head to the lamp and counted the planes the light made on it.

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By dusk she had scored eleven faces into the brow alone, straight lines running from ear to muzzle like the spokes of a broken wheel. Where two lines met she pressed a little with the bone tool. The master came by with his oil lamp, saw the sharp cheek, and grunted. Then he saw the red. Tamit had ground ochre with gum and dabbed it into three facets above the eyes, only the ones the flame struck hardest, and left the rest grey as river silt.

Nobody asked her to explain. The boatmen who bought small amulets for their wives at the quay had no use for theory. But she thought about the eyes, which she had shaded in smoke-coloured paint so they seemed to sit back inside the head, and about how the red only woke when the light came from one side. A thing made of many small faces would look different at every hour of the day.

Weeks later she saw one hanging from a reed cabin at the water's edge, turning slowly on its cord. When the wind swung it toward the sun the red facets flared, then went dark, then flared again. Tamit kept walking. She had made it to keep a promise she never wrote down, and it seemed to be keeping the promise without her.