Black ink flash design of a cat face built from tribal-style swirls, dots and small cat motifs, with no body placement shown.

Ornamental cat face tattoo design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A black ink design drawn on a white background showing a cat face made from ornamental tribal-style swirls, hatching and dots. Small motifs are scattered around the face, including a fish skeleton, a moon, a sitting cat silhouette, a Celtic knot and the kanji for cat. The linework is bold and high contrast, and the composition fills the frame edge to edge.

Blackwork Dotwork Cat Cat face Whiskers Moon Celtic knot Kanji Dot Swirl Sitting cat

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bride's mother had counted the fish twice, and still there was one short for the feast, so Old Pell took a lantern down to the weir with a bent pin. The cat was waiting on the mill wall where she always waited, her tail wrapped round her feet, watching the water as if it owed her money.

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"Not that one," Pell said, when she came down the bank after him. "That's for the bride's table."

The cat ate nothing. She only looked at the lantern, then at the moon lying flat on the millpond like a dropped coin. Pell had tied a ribbon of red wool round the gatepost that morning for the wedding, and the wool had come loose and drifted into the reeds. The cat went after it, and in the reeds she found the little tin knot the miller's daughter had lost from her collar that afternoon.

They walked back up the lane together, the cat carrying the knot in her mouth like a thrush with a worm, the fish bones in Pell's apron clinking softly. At the church gate the bride stood waiting in her grandmother's veil, and when she saw the cat she laughed out loud, the way you laugh when someone returns a thing you had given up for lost. "Well," said Pell, "the fish is short and the knot is found, so the cat has earned her supper." The cat sat down on the gatepost, cleaned one paw, and did not look at anyone at all.