Fine line black tattoo of a sitting cat gazing upwards, placed on the side of the ankle in a black and grey photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sitting cat on an ankle

Fine line · Ankle · Black and grey · Photo

A small single-line tattoo of a cat sitting upright with its head raised and its tail curled around its body. The linework is thin and even, drawn in black ink on pale skin, with no shading. The tattoo sits off-centre on the side of the ankle against a plain, softly lit background.

Fine line Ankle Cat Sitting cat Outline

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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

Nobody at the reunion remembered Mr Pargeter's rule, so I had to say it out loud. Draw the thing in one line, he used to tell us, and don't lift the pencil until it's finished. Ruth Ashdown laughed and said she had never once managed it, which I suppose was the point. I was thinking of the stray that sat on the bin store behind the chip shop in 1987, chin up, watching the balconies as if someone might drop a sausage down to her.

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I had drawn her a dozen times in the back of my maths book. Always the same pose: upright, head lifted, tail brought round her feet like a loose rope. Ruth asked what I'd called her. I said nothing. We never named her, because Pargeter said naming a thing made you answerable for it, and that was the only lesson of his I kept.

Then Gavin Mills came over with his phone, scrolling past photos of his twins and a new conservatory, and stopped at a picture of a small black cat drawn in a single wobbly stroke. He'd found the sheet in a box of his mum's things. It was mine. I had left it on her kitchen table the week we moved to Hull, and she had kept it in the drawer with the takeaway menus for thirty years.

I didn't tell him much. He asked whether it was a good likeness of something. I said it was a cat who never came down off the bins, and that she had been waiting for one particular window, and that I'd spent a long time not knowing which. He shrugged and went for another drink. I stayed put, tracing the line on the paper with my thumb, feeling for the place where I had lifted the pencil.