Painted design of a grinning grey cat with pale blue eyes and blue-striped fur, emerging through a swirling smoky wash on white paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Grinning cat emerging from smoke

Mixed · Flash

A painted drawing of a grinning cat with wide pale blue eyes, a pink nose and a broad toothy smile, its head and front paws breaking through a torn hole in a dark smoky background. The fur and tail use soft grey shading with blue stripes and highlights, and the smoke is rendered in brown and grey washes. The design is centred on a white sheet with the cat filling the frame.

Cat Cheshire cat Smile Smoke Eye Paw Tail

Find an artist for this

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 fog came off the Dogger like wet wool that week, and the Mary Ellen lay with her engine ticking, waiting for it to lift. Dad always said never trust a calm sea in March. I had my hands in a tub of bait, cutting mackerel into strips, when the smoke began to curl up through the gap between the hatch boards.

Keep reading

It was no ordinary smoke. It came from the hold, grey and brown, and it had a shape to it, the way a cloud does when you stare too long. Then the grin arrived before anything else: wide, toothy, a little too pleased with itself, hanging in the murk above the hatch like a lamp someone had forgotten to put out. Pale blue eyes. Then a head, a paw resting on the coaming, and a striped tail flicking the wet deck as if it owned the boat.

Tom Keeble, my deckhand, swore it was a cat off the quay at Whitby. I told him cats don't walk through fog with teeth like that. The cat watched us haul the nets all morning and never once blinked. Every time I looked at the rail it had moved a yard further aft, and every time I turned back, the grin was still there, closer, patient.

When the fog finally lifted we were forty miles from where I'd pointed the bow. The hold was full of silver, more than we'd seen in a decade. Nobody asked me how. I went down alone and the smoke had gone, but on the wet boards a line of pawprints led up to the hatch, and a single fish, gutted clean, sat neatly on the top step. I left it there. A man doesn't argue with a grin like that when the nets come up heavy.