Black and grey dotwork panther tattoo with geometric diamond patterns filling its body, walking across the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric panther on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A walking panther is outlined in fine black linework, with its head and legs solid black and its body filled with stippled dots and geometric diamond and chevron shapes. The shading is entirely black and grey, and the tattoo sits centrally on the side of the ribs, with the cat's tail curling up towards the back.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Panther Cat Diamond Chevron Geometric pattern Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had come in sideways off the moor by eleven, and Nell Ashby stopped pretending the awning would hold. She stacked the indigo shawls on the trestle table and tucked the wool skeins under a tarpaulin while the cheese van across the lane shook its shutters. That was when the panther came through the gap between the fishmonger and the bread stall, head low, shoulders dark with wet, as if the Saturday crowd had been laid out for it like a carpet.

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It walked the way the stall men walked, unhurried, and nobody stopped it. Where its feet touched the flags the stone took a faint blue stain from the vat her father had left uncovered behind the stall, and the cat's solid black legs seemed to drink it in. Its body was all tiny stippled dots, bright where the rain beaded on them, and inside the outline ran diamonds and chevrons, the same pattern her grandmother had stitched into the border of every shawl on the table.

A woman in a green anorak lifted one shawl to the light and asked what the pattern was meant to say. Nell opened her mouth to answer and found she had nothing ready. Her father, wrapping the bread stall's change in newspaper, said the old dyers used to press diamonds into cloth so a traveller could find the road home across the moor when the mist came down. The woman bought the shawl anyway, and the cat sat down beside the empty crate with its tail curled up towards the sky.

When the market emptied, the rain finally eased. Nell crouched by the kerb and found the cat's prints still there on the wet flags, each one a little diamond of indigo, fading at the edges. She left them where they were, and let the next downpour decide what to keep.