Black and grey traditional dotwork tattoo of a stylised cat with floral patterns, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental cat on the ribs

Traditional · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised cat seen from behind, sitting upright with its tail curled at the bottom, is filled with ornamental petal and leaf patterns. The linework is bold black, with the body shaded in fine dots and small areas of unshaded skin left as highlights. The design is centred on the ribcage in black and grey ink, with the cat's face and ears at the top and the curled tail below.

Traditional Dotwork Ribs Cat Flower Petal Leaves Tail Ornament Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dessa had been driving the Calloway road for nine hours when the cat appeared on the tailgate of the truck ahead, sitting upright and facing away from her, as if it had been waiting for the traffic to notice it. Someone had painted it in black and rust, petals stacked on its haunches, leaves curling down its flanks, and a tail that ended in a neat hook like a question mark. Road dust on the back window had been wiped in one long arc so the paint showed through.

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She followed it for forty miles, past the salt flats and the shuttered petrol station at Ruth's Wells, until the truck pulled into a yard of corrugated sheds and a man climbed down with a tin of ochre and a fine brush. He saw her staring. "Mam's pattern," he said, nodding at the cat. "She cut the stencil from a biscuit tin lid in nineteen sixty-one. Every dot was a nail hole. Took her a week to make one cat, and she said that was the right speed for a cat."

Dessa asked if he'd sell the stencil. He laughed and said the stencil was the cat, the cat belonged to the road, and the truck was going to the scrapyard on Monday anyway. He handed her the tin lid instead, dented, its ornaments worn down to bright points.

She drove the rest of the way with the lid on the passenger seat, and each time the road bent she glanced across at it, the little black cat sitting upright in the heat as if nothing had ever been asked of it. At the coast she pressed one dot into the dust on the dashboard with her thumb and left it there.