Black and grey pencil drawing of a sphynx cat with a third eye and winged eyes, beside a snake and roses, as a tattoo design.

Sphynx cat with snake and roses design

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A detailed pencil drawing of a hairless sphynx cat wearing a jewelled mask with a third eye, a studded collar and a strand of beads. Winged eyes flank the cat, a striped snake with an open mouth coils at lower right, and shaded roses sit at lower left, all set against radiating rays and splashes. The work uses fine hatching and soft shading in black and grey on pale paper, with coloured pencils and pens visible at the top edge.

Neo-trad Cat Sphynx cat Snake Rose Wing Eye Bead Collar Ray

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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 is sitting on top of the obs trolley when you come back from the sluice at ten past three, bare and grey as a peeled almond, with a string of jet beads looped twice round its neck. Nobody on Ward Nine owns it. The porters have tried to shoo it out through the fire door and it simply returns, the way the night bleep returns, always at the moment you have just sat down.

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Tonight the buckle on its collar catches the corridor light. The eye set in the brass is the twin of the one in the middle of its forehead, and when it turns its head you feel it look past you, down the bay, to bed four. Mr Pennington has been asleep since supper, breathing like a kettle coming off the boil. You check his line and his sats are fine, the printout says so, but the cat has already jumped down and is sitting at the foot of the bed with its tail wrapped round its feet, perfectly still, the way the old women in the chapel used to sit before a funeral.

You stand there with your hand on the cold rail, thinking of the snake you once saw coiled round the handle of a mop bucket behind the bins, and of the roses the chaplain keeps on the windowsill, which nobody has ever watered. You ring for the registrar anyway. Then you pull the chair close and sit with him. The cat does not move. Neither do you.

At six the day staff come on and the cat is gone, leaving a faint smell of cut grass and one black bead in the crease of the sheet. Mr Pennington is awake and asking, quite loudly, for a proper cup of tea. You make it strong, the way he likes, and carry it back along the corridor with both hands, and you do not mention the bead to anyone, though you keep it in your pocket all the way home.