Black line drawing of a stylised cat sitting inside an ornate oval scrollwork frame, a flash design suited to a tattoo.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stylised cat in an ornate oval frame

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A black line drawing of a slender, stylised cat sitting upright in profile, with a long curving tail and an elongated head. The cat sits inside an oval border of dotted beading surrounded by an ornate frame of scrolls, swirls and leaf-like curls. The image is monochrome, with clean even linework and no shading, and the design is centred and symmetrical.

Fine line Cat Frame Scroll Oval Ornament

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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 has walked the gallery rail again, and you find her there at dawn, sitting upright with her tail curled round her feet as though she has been posted to watch the water. Ferris, the relief man, swears she counts the flashes. You tell him cats do not count, but you have stopped arguing since the winter the lamp failed and she sat on the sill for three nights, staring at the black mouth of the bay until the fault was found.

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Her portrait hangs in the lamp room, a pen-and-ink thing you bought from a stall in Penzance for a shilling, framed in tarnished brass with a border of scrolls. Nobody else sees the resemblance. Her head is long and narrow, her ears tipped like folded paper, and the tail rises in one slow loop before it reaches the floor. You have stared at that loop for more hours than you care to admit, on nights when the wind was loud enough to drown out the foghorn.

Tonight the glass is clean and the sea is flat as slate. Pale fog lies in the cove, and the beam sweeps across it like a hand smoothing a sheet. You feel her weight shift against your ankle, and you wait for her to leap onto the iron rail, which she always does when a boat is coming in late.

Then you hear the oars. Two voices, too far off to make out, and a splash that is not a seal. You reach for the telescope and she is already gone down the stairs, a grey shape in the spiral, and you realise for the first time that she has never once been afraid of the dark.