Hairless sphynx cat with black and grey ornamental tattoos on its neck, beside a tattooed human upper arm showing a woman's portrait.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sphynx cat with neck tattoos beside a tattooed arm

Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A hairless sphynx cat sits in front of a red brick wall, with black and grey tattoo work covering its neck and upper chest. The designs include ornamental panels, a crescent-shaped motif and a figurative element, rendered in fine shading and linework. A tattooed human arm enters from the right, showing a woman's portrait and swirling forms in grey and muted tones.

Neck Upper arm Cat Sphynx cat Swirl Crescent

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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 down, our Ellen, and stop fiddling with that poker, you'll have the fire out. Yes, the cat. He came up the Hollin shaft in the lamp-cage the winter the roof fell in on the Dukes, bald as a boiled egg and grey as the spoil heaps, and the men swore he'd been born under the ground and had never once seen the sun.

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Nobody owned him, so Tom Adair took him in. Tom had soot ink and a steady hand from forty years of stitching pit-boots, and most nights he sat by the range with that cat across his knees, pricking lines into the pale skin under its chin. A crescent first, like the moon over the chapel roof. Then ornamental panels, scrolled like the iron gates of the Institute, then a little lamp, then a woman's face in the corner that Tom would never explain.

When the second fall came in March, eleven men were sealed in the low workings, and the rescue gang went down with lamps that would not stay lit. The cat was not in the kitchen that night. Tom found him sitting on the pit-head wall, staring at the black mouth of the shaft as if he were counting.

The rescue men swore afterwards they followed a grey trail of ink along the rock, glowing faintly under their lamps, the same soot Tom had pricked into that cat's throat. Ten came up behind it. The eleventh, Tom always said, was carried out by the cat's own patience, and that's why, when you see a moon inked on a man's arm in the Labour Club, you ask him whose cat he was following out of the dark.