Black and grey tattoo of a snarling cat head with bared fangs and dotted shading, on a lower leg, in a traditional blackwork style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snarling cat head on a calf

Traditional · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

A bold cat head with pointed ears, bared fangs and a wide open mouth, drawn in solid black outlines. The face is filled with rows of short dashes and stippled dots for shading, while the eyes and muzzle are left as open white areas. The design fills the frame against a dark background, with the tattoo sitting on smooth skin.

Traditional Blackwork Dotwork Calf Cat Cat head Fangs Whiskers Teeth Eye

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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

Sit still now, because that cat won't come out while you're fidgeting, and I'll not tell it twice. This was the late summer the Pearmains came in so heavy the boughs touched the grass, and the wasps came in heavier. Old Tobias Rudd kept an orchard above Hollins End with one grey tom to guard it, a beast called Sable with a mouth like a rake and no patience for anybody who wasn't family.

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Somebody was coming over the wall each night after the church bell. Tobias found the windfalls gone and the grass trodden flat, and he sat up on an upturned crate with his lamp dimmed and his boots off, listening. Sable sat beside him, not purring, with her ears laid back and her jaws wide enough to show every tooth she owned. When the wall stones clicked at last, she gave a sound like a kettle going over, and a boy's shape froze in the moonlight with his arms full of bruised fruit.

Tobias meant to shout. Instead he saw the boy's shoes were split at the toes and his wrists were thin as bean canes. It was Eli Parrish, whose mother had taken in mending since her husband went to sea and never come home. Tobias said nothing. He only lifted the lamp so the boy could see the stone by the wall, and Sable, to everyone's surprise including her own, pressed against the boy's shin and let him pass.

In the morning there was a row of the finest Pearmains set out along that wall, polished on a sleeve and lined up like a good clock. Sable was asleep on top of them, one paw over her nose, and she wouldn't be moved until noon.