Small solid black cat silhouette tattoo behind a person's ear, shown in a black and white photograph.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Small cat silhouette behind the ear

Other · Black and grey · Photo

A small solid black silhouette of a seated cat sits on the skin behind the ear, with its tail curling out to the side. The design is filled with flat black ink and has no internal linework or shading. The photograph is in black and white, with the ear and hair framing the small tattoo against plain skin.

Other Cat Silhouette

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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

The cat came aboard at Gravesend with a rope of wet hair in its mouth and no name anyone would own up to. Cook called it Tallow because it sat on the warm lid of the galley stove as if it had paid for the privilege. By the time the Calliope cleared the Channel, it had claimed the coil of hawser beneath the forecastle hatch and the mate's boots, and nobody on the watch bothered to argue.

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You learn its habits the way you learn the sea, by getting them wrong first. It would not walk the yards in a blow, but it would sit on the bowsprit in a flat calm and watch the flying fish like a magistrate. It stole herring from the messes and never once went over the side, which the bosun said was proof of a bargain struck with someone below. When the ship rolled in the Bay of Biscay, it wedged itself into the lee of the chart table and purred through three days of green water.

Off the Cape of Good Hope the fever took two of the boys, and the surgeon went grey with bleeding them. Tallow came down to the sickbay and lay across the chest of the youngest, the lad from Bristol who sang hymns in a voice like a rusty gate. He stopped singing on the second night. On the third morning he was asleep and breathing, and the cat had gone back up the ladder with its tail curled high, black against the grey dawn, as though it had only come down to check the arithmetic.

At Fremantle they paid it off with a red ribbon and a tin of pilchards, and it jumped ashore without a backward look. The sailors said that was the sign of a cat who knew its own mind. The lad from Bristol still swears he saw it at the top of the gangway, sitting very neatly, waiting for the tide.