Fine line black tattoo of a simple cat face with ears, eyes and whiskers on the back of a person's neck, with hair falling around it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Minimal cat face on the back of the neck

Fine line · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A small cat face is tattooed on the back of a neck, showing two pointed ears, two dot eyes, a small nose and three whiskers on each side. The lines are thin and single-weight, with no shading, and the ink is solid black. The photograph is black and white, with the subject's hair framing the top of the image and a blurred room behind.

Fine line Neck Cat Cat face Whiskers

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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

Sit closer, you lot, the cistern lamps are going brown and I'll not tell this twice. Four hundred years after the last rain fell on Ludgate Sump, there was a woman called Orla Venn who kept the seed vaults under the old Thames barrier. She kept a grey cat called Pock, because cats were the only thing the mould could not eat. Pock had a face so small you needed a magnifier to find it: two dot eyes, a nose like a crumb, and whiskers drawn in three quick strokes a side. The vault crew knew which corridor was safe by where Pock sat. Facing a door meant the door was sound. Turning her back meant you ran.

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One winter the sealant failed in the north gallery and the air went sweet and thick. The crew went to the hatch in their masks, shouting numbers at each other, and Orla went looking for the cat. She found Pock at the foot of the stairwell, ears flat, facing the wrong way. Orla crouched down and, for the first time in thirty years, looked properly at that small drawn face, lines so thin they might have been breath on glass. She understood then that the cat had never been guarding anything. She had been reading the air, and the air was telling them the stairwell was rotten.

They lived. The north gallery was walled off with recycled tin, and the seed stock went up the ladder one sack at a time. Orla never got Pock to sit still for a second portrait, so the face scratched on the cistern wall stayed the only likeness anyone had. People still tap it with two fingers when they pass, the way you'd touch a charm.

Now off you go, and mind the third step. It's been lying to people since before your grandmothers were born.