Colour tattoo of a stitched, zombie-style cat character with a red bow and skull on an upper arm, in a neo-traditional style.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stitched zombie cat character on an upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a cartoon cat character with a round head, red bow and blue dungarees, styled as a stitched-together toy with a skull on the bow, dark drips, and red blood spatters. The outlines are bold and dark, with flat fills and some shading on the body and limbs. Yellow-olive, red and blue ink dominate against a plain skin background, and the design is centred on the upper arm.

Neo-trad Upper arm Cat Skull Bow Stitches Blood Zombie Cartoon character

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

The x-ray screen lights up at twenty past three, and you know before you lean in that it is going to be a long shift. A battered toy cat sits in the tray between a phrasebook and a child's rain boot, round-headed, stitched at the seams, one eye a black button gone soft. Somebody has sewn a skull onto the bow. Somebody has given it a plaster on one knee. You rest your chin on your fist and wait for the machine to tell you it's harmless, which it does, in the dull green way machines do.

Keep reading

Ellis, the night officer on the other lane, wanders over with his coffee. "Stuffed animal," you say, as if that settles it. He peers at the screen. "Looks like it's been through the wars." You tell him it has the look of a thing loved well past the point of being presentable, and he laughs, and then you both look at the monitor longer than protocol allows.

The owner comes up the queue with a passport in a plastic sleeve and a face that has been awake since Lyon. You hold the cat up by its one good ear. It is heavier than it looks, packed with something dense. You ask, flatly, whether it has anything to declare. She says it's called Dottie and has been to every border since she was nine, and it is the only thing in the bag she'd stop for. Her voice wobbles on the last word, and you put the cat back in the tray more gently than you meant to.

You stamp the passport and wave her through. Later, when the lanes are empty, you find yourself thinking about the bandage on the cat's knee, and how someone must have sat up stitching it by a lamp, patient as a surgeon, promising it would be fine. You hope they were right. Under the fluorescent light, the skull on the bow looks almost cheerful.