Black ink and grey pencil drawing of a stylised cat with spider web patterns on its body and a curling tail, a design suitable for a tattoo.

Stylised cat with spider web and swirling tail

Black and grey · Flash

A stylised cat sits upright in profile, with a tall, elongated neck and head, and its long tail curls into spiral ends at the lower edge. Bold black outlines define the figure, while soft grey pencil shading adds depth to the tail and body. Fine spider web patterns fill sections of the body and tail, and the plain pale background leaves the design isolated.

Cat Spider web Spiral Tail Silhouette

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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

Now sit closer, because the wind off the bay gets into the story if you let it. Gull's Rest has had a cat on the newel post since before my mother kept the books, and that cat was never anybody's. She came up the harbour steps one wet March with her tail wound round and round her like a rope on a capstan, and she sat on the third stair and looked at us as though we were the ones who'd arrived late.

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Her neck was long as a bell rope and her ears were sharp enough to cut bread. Spiders loved her. Every autumn they strung their webs from her whiskers to the banister, from her shoulder to the coat hooks, until she wore lace like a widow at a funeral. Mrs Pell swept at it with the brush every Friday, and every Friday the cat sat still and let the old woman work, then went back to watching the door with her yellow eyes half shut.

The year the Harcourt boy's trunk went missing, the whole house blamed the scullery girl. Ottoline said nothing. She only went down to the cellar, and in the morning the spiders had spun a silver net from the cellar door to the harbour gate, and in the net, caught neat as flies, were three gold sovereigns and a brass key. Nobody asked how she managed it. Nobody asked why the webs were always thickest where the cat had been sleeping.

So when you hear the stair creak tonight, don't go looking. Tail first, that's how she comes down. Round the newel, round the banister, and one long curl at the foot of the bed. If you wake and there's a thread across your face, be polite and say good evening. She's still counting what the house owes her.