Black and grey sketch-style tattoo of a cat with a skeletal ribcage inside angular geometric shapes, on the upper arm.

Sketch-style cat and ribcage on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a cat-like animal crouching within a faceted, angular frame, with its skeleton and ribs partly visible beneath. The work uses fine, loose, sketchy linework with light grey shading and dark accents, and small shards of geometric shapes spread across the top and sides. The design fills the upper arm, and the image is a close, well-lit photograph against a white surface.

Geometric Upper arm Cat Animal Skeleton Ribcage Geometric shape

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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

Mind the step, that's where the frost gets under the flags. Sit by the fire where I can see your hands, because this is a winter story and winter stories want close company. The winter the mill-race froze solid, old Hetty Brack kept a grey tom in her lean-to barn, and he was the thinnest cat in the dale, for he gave every scrap of his supper to the strays that came scratching at her door.

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Hetty had a glass prism that fell off a manor chandelier when the big house was sold for timber. She hung it in the barn window on a length of red thread, and when the low sun or the lantern caught it, the light broke into shards that skidded across the whitewash like a sky smashed on a stone. Tom would crouch in the brightest patch and watch the shapes shift. His coat was so thin that the light went straight through him, and Hetty swore she could count his ribs through the glass like the bars of a gate.

One night in the dead of January, a fox came to the barn door with a crow in its jaws and the whole dale starving. Tom stepped into the prism's light, and the angles of it folded around him, and he came out the far side wearing a coat of sharp grey lines, moving quick and precise over the snow. He brought back a hen's worth of eggs, a rabbit, and a sack of meal from the Carrs' store, and nobody ever saw him eat a crumb.

Come spring, Hetty found the glass in the thaw, cracked clean through. Tom was never found again, but on the first warm morning there were paw prints in the mud, leading from the window out to the dale, and every one of them had a thin dark line running through the middle, like a bone under the skin. Mind the step going out.