Black and grey dotwork tattoo of a cat's face framed by filigree ornaments on a forearm.

Ornamental cat head on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A cat's face is set within a mandala-like ornamental frame, with pointed ears, eyes and whiskers drawn in fine black linework. Shading is built from dense stippled dots, with the ornate scrollwork and cross-shaped motifs extending along the forearm. The image is shot against a plain black background in black and grey ink only.

Dotwork Geometric Forearm Cat Cat face Mandala Filigree Ornament Scrollwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Hollis had been pricking pattern holes for thirty-one years, and the cat had been sleeping on the drawings for at least nine of them. Tansy, the grey tom from the mill yard, liked the warm card under the lamp better than the fire. Each evening she shifted him with the back of her hand, and each morning he was back, curled over the cross-shaped corner of whatever sheet she had left out.

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The commission came from a merchant in Leicester who wanted a collar piece for his daughter's wedding gown, a circle of lace with a face in the middle of it. He had seen a cat's face in a dream, he said, and wanted it stitched. Mrs Hollis told him cats did not hold still for lace. She began the drawing anyway, scrolling filigree outward from the centre, and found that every time she drew the eyes she drew them wrong, too round and too soft, more like a night watchman's than a cat's.

On the fourth night she turned the lamp low, set the pricker down, and watched Tansy. He opened one eye, then the other, and held her look until the wick guttered. In the morning she worked the eyes with tiny stippled dots, hundreds of them, dense where the shadow fell, and the face rose out of the card as if someone had been waiting behind it.

The collar went south in a tin box lined with tissue. Tansy sat in the empty chair where the sheets had been and washed one paw, pleased with himself, as though the lace had been his idea all along.