Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a hairless cat with three glowing eyes and crossed bones, on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Hairless cat with crossed bones on ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A hairless cat head with three pale, glowing eyes, one on the forehead, sits above two crossed bones. The face and ears are built from dense dotwork stippling and fine lines, with heavier shadow along the jaw and inner ears. The design is black and grey only, with small ink splatter below the bones, and it fills the centre of the frame across the ribs.

Dotwork Ribs Cat Sphynx cat Third eye Bone Splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

At Hollin Mere the wedding feast was never held without the cat, and nobody could say whose cat she was. She came up the causeway each spring with the tide, a bald grey creature with ears like wet leaves and three pale eyes, the third set high on her brow where a thumb might rest. The village called her Nell. She ate sorrel from the sexton's wall and slept in the bone-house beside the churchyard, and no one had ever heard her purr.

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The year Agnes Miller married Tom Reeve, the bride wanted the cat put out. Her mother had dreamed of crossed bones over a door, so the sexton had dug two old thigh bones from the marsh bank and laid them on the lych gate to keep the rain off the hinges. Agnes stood at the altar with her hand in Tom's, and Nell sat in the aisle with her three eyes fixed on him. Tom laughed and said a cat was good luck. The priest began the vows.

When the question came, Nell rose, walked to the altar step and nudged one of the bones down with her paw. It clattered across the flags and lay crossed with its fellow at Tom's boots. The third eye opened wider, bright as a lamp. Then the room saw what the cat had seen: Tom's shadow lay on the stones with no feet, and the water pooling under his heels smelled of the Mere in autumn, when the flood had taken him. He had been let up for one morning only.

He went back down the causeway before the bell had finished ringing. Agnes never married again. Nell stayed on in the bone-house, and each spring she came up the causeway to sit on Agnes's step, and the sexton left the gate bare.