Two photographs of a black line tattoo of an ornamental cat filled with swirls and a crescent, with a dotted mandala behind it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Ornamental cat with dotwork mandala

Dotwork · Black and grey · Photo

A black line tattoo of a seated cat outline, filled with ornamental swirls, a flower motif and a crescent shape. A dotted mandala sits behind the cat on the left side of each photo. The two photographs show the same design from slightly different angles, in black ink on pale skin.

Dotwork Fine line Cat Mandala Flower Swirl Crescent Dotwork

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nell had been told the cat was bad luck for the third time that morning, and she had stopped arguing with Mrs Abernethy's ledger. The cat sat on the harbour wall at Skerrow, filled with its own patterns, as if someone had poured lace into a jug and let it set. Every evening it watched the boats come in with the same flat patience.

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Nell's work was pricking stencils. She sat at the back of the net loft with a pounce wheel and a sheet of brown paper, following the drawings her grandfather had left in a biscuit tin. Dots, thousands of them, each one a small hole to let the powder through. The mandala she was making for the kirk ladies would take a week, and her hands ached already. The cat, she decided, must have been drawn by someone with more patience than sense.

On the Thursday the cat was gone from the wall. Nell found it at dusk under an upturned dory, lying with its tail curled around a crescent of wet tin she didn't recognise. Beside it lay a folded paper in her grandfather's hand, saying the crescent was the moon's share of the catch, and that whoever kept the cat fed would never lose a boat. She laughed, then didn't.

She carried the cat home in her apron and set it on the windowsill, where the lamp would catch the swirls. In the morning the stencil she had pricked overnight had come out perfect, every dot where it should be, the flower open at its centre like a lamp. She pressed the powder through and watched the pattern rise on the linen, and for once she did not count the holes.