Close photo of a small solid black cat silhouette tattoo on the side of a person's ribs, with a lilac top pulled up beside it.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small black cat on the side ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black silhouette of a cat walking to the right, with its tail raised, sits on smooth skin along the side of the torso. The lines are crisp and the fill is uniform, with no shading or detail inside the outline. The tattoo is set against a warm, tanned background with a lilac fabric top pulled up at the edge of the frame, and the composition is tightly cropped on the skin.

Ribs Cat Silhouette Animal

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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

Mrs Oddie kept the only shop on Scar Lane that sold paraffin and bread across the same counter, and she had a black cat called Tuesday that would not be carried anywhere. Everybody in Hollin Bridge knew that. So when the cat slipped out through the back gate one wet morning in March 1953 and turned right instead of left, towards the mill road, nobody thought to follow it.

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It walked the mill road with its tail held up like a question mark, stopping at every puddle to consider its own face before stepping over. The men unloading coal at the wharf watched it go past without a word. Old Tom Ashby, who had lost a brother to the pit and no longer spoke to the vicar, said the cat was walking the rain out of the valley, and he was right, because the river fell that week and the bridge that had been under water since Christmas stood dry for the first time in months.

Mrs Oddie did not go looking. She sat behind her counter with the kettle going cold and counted the tins twice. At dusk the cat came back through the gate with dry paws and sat on the step as though it had only been to the end of the lane. She put down a saucer of milk, and it drank without looking at her.

The carter delivered the paraffin a day early the next morning, and he brought a note from the council about the bridge reopening. The cat never walked the mill road again. It sat on the step facing the hills, and when the bell over the door rang it turned its head to see who had come in, then looked back at the road it had already walked.