Pencil and ink sketch of a hairless sphynx cat above a skull, framed by geometric linework and dotwork, drawn on paper.

Sphynx cat and skull design sketch

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hand-drawn design of a hairless sphynx cat in profile, with a skull placed beneath its head and a small crown-like ornament above. Fine sketched linework and stippled dots shade the features, and thin geometric lines and scrolls frame the composition. The drawing is in black ink or pencil on pale paper with a teal cast from the photograph, with a pen lying across the lower right.

Dotwork Geometric Sphynx cat Cat Skull Crown Geometric frame Dot Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, for the wind off the Skerry takes half of this and gives nothing back. You want to know about the cat. Everybody on Inish Morra knows the cat, though not everybody knows she had no fur. Her name was Maud, and she came ashore from a Dutch trawler in the winter the harbour froze, bald as a boiled egg and furious about it.

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Old Daniel Cray kept the light on the north point, and he kept her too, because the cold got into her ears and she would not stop shivering until he wrapped her in his oilskin. Every night she climbed the stair behind him and sat on the sill beside the skull he had dug out of the dunes. Nobody knew whose it was. Daniel said it belonged to a sailor who came in with the tide wearing a brass crown on a cord round his neck, and that the crown went to the bottom of the bay with the rest of him. Daniel had found a bent scrap of brass there himself, and hung it on a nail above the lamp.

The winter the light failed, Maud would not come down. She sat with her black eyes on the sea and her bare ears turned out like two open hands, and when the boats came back blind in the fog they heard her before they saw the rocks. Daniel said she was only cold. He was wrong about that, and about most things, but he was right that she never once looked at the skull the way a cat looks at something it means to eat.

When the fog lifted in the spring they found the nail empty and the scrap of crown set neatly on the skull's brow, as though someone had put it there to keep the cat company. Daniel never said who. Maud said nothing either, which was her way.