Neo-traditional tattoo of a grey lynx face with amber eyes and orange and yellow flowers across the back of a hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lynx face and flowers on the back of a hand

Neo-trad · Hand · Mixed · Photo

A stylised lynx face fills the back of the hand, with a small dark bird perched near the top and yellow and orange flowers with green leaves framing the head. The cat is rendered with bold black outlines and soft grey shading, while the amber eyes and flowers add warm colour. The tattoo is shown centred on the hand against a dark background, with the fingers curled slightly toward the camera.

Neo-trad Traditional Hand Cat Flower Bird Leaves

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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

Shift along and mind the peat smoke, it's the only thing on this island that keeps the midges honest. You'll have heard the lynx went off the island with the monks, the way the ferry men tell it. That's a tidy story and not the true one. The true one starts with Ishbel Macrae and her boathouse at the north end of Cnoc Dubh.

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Ishbel kept a grey cat with ears like a pair of old gloves and eyes the colour of whisky held up to a window. It came and went through the slats as it pleased. Every evening it sat on the drystone wall where the yellow flowers grew wild, the ones her mother called Sunday gold, and watched the bay. Nobody owned that cat, but it owned the rafters. A jackdaw lived up there too, one-eyed and vain, and it stole anything that glinted: buttons, bent nails, the brass cap off a paraffin lamp. The cat never once chased it. They shared the warm beam like two old neighbours who had long since given up arguing.

The winter the herring failed, the jackdaw took Ishbel's wedding ring from the windowsill. She searched the shingle for a week and found nothing but razor shells. On the eighth morning the cat came down the slope with its tail held high and dropped the ring at her feet, then sat on the jackdaw's nest of stolen wire looking pleased with itself. Ishbel said nothing. That night she hung the ring on a ribbon round the cat's neck, and the jackdaw never forgave either of them.

Come spring the flowers were up along the wall again. If you walk down to that boathouse at dusk you'll still see a grey cat there, and a black bird on its shoulder, both of them pretending the other isn't.