Pen drawing of a hairless sphynx cat head in dotted linework, a flash design for a tattoo with no body placement shown.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sphynx cat head dotwork design

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A hairless sphynx cat head faces forward, drawn in black ink on paper with large round eyes, folded ears and wrinkled skin. The outlines and skin texture are built from dotted and stippled lines, with bold contours around the face and ears. The image is black and grey, with two black ink pens resting at the top of the frame and the drawing filling most of the composition.

Dotwork Cat Sphynx cat Animal portrait

Find an artist for this

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

Thursday, 14th May. Mrs Pargeter came in with the cat again, the bald one she calls Bishop, and set him on my counter between the carbon paper and the pot of gum as if he were a parcel she wanted weighed. He is not handsome in the way a cat ought to be. His skin hangs in folds like a wet dressing gown, his ears are turned down at the tips, and his eyes are so round and so bright that Mr Haddow from the chemist's has twice asked whether he is ill. Mrs Pargeter says he is only old and thinks himself a magistrate.

Keep reading

She wants him drawn. Not photographed, because the man from Harrogate who does photographs wants four shillings and a day's notice, but drawn in Indian ink on good card, so she has something to hang over the mantel once he goes. I told her a pen can't be made to sit still, and she said that was why I was to use dots. Every crease, every whisker-bed, every hollow under the jaw, one dot at a time, until the shadow comes from the crowding and not from any line I'd have to lift the nib for.

So I have been at it since two o'clock. The shop bell has rung four times. Bishop has slept through all of it on the ledger, purring like a kettle that has forgotten it is on. Near four he opened one eye at me, and I thought of the drawing I made of my father's face at the end, all dots and no line, and I stopped. Some things you can only leave with dots and let the dark gather where it likes.