Colour tattoo of a ginger cat head with pink roses and leaves on the wrist, drawn in fine line style.

Ginger cat and roses on a wrist

Fine line · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A ginger tabby cat's head in three-quarter view sits on the wrist, with its ears and eyes detailed in fine linework. Pink roses and dark leaves form a loose wreath around the lower and upper edges of the cat. Soft orange and pink shading gives the cat a painted look against the pale skin, and the design is centred on the wrist with the fingers and painted nails visible to the left.

Fine line Botanical Forearm Cat Rose Leaves Animal portrait

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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 officer at the desk at Dover asks you to take your sleeves up, and you do it the way you would hand over a letter you have rewritten twelve times. He turns your wrist towards the lamp. The ginger cat looks back at him with its amber eyes, head tilted as if it has been waiting all morning for someone to notice it. Pink roses curl round its ears and dark leaves crowd the bottom edge, pale ink on the thin skin of the inside of your arm.

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"Pet?" he says.

"Her name was Marmalade," you tell him, and it is true, though she was never yours. She belonged to Mrs Okafor across the landing in Lewisham, who left her with you for three summers while she nursed her sister in Enugu. The cat slept on your coat and bit the postman. When Mrs Okafor did not come back, you kept the cat, and then the cat was the only thing in the flat that remembered the shape of you.

He checks the form, then checks your face, then looks at the wrist again. Nobody at the desk has ever asked why a woman would carry a cat on her skin when she could carry it in a photograph. You do not explain. You say the rose was the tattooist's idea, a little extra in the wreath for luck.

He stamps the page and slides it back. As you pull your sleeve down over the wreath, the cat stays where it always stays, looking just past your shoulder, towards the door that opens onto the far side of the water.