Coloured drawing of a cat face in sugar skull style, with black outlines, patterned fills and floral eyes, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull cat design

Colour · Flash

A cat's head is drawn in a sugar skull style, with a face-shaped outline and patterned fills across the forehead, cheeks and muzzle. The eyes are filled with flower motifs, and a red and orange heart sits on the nose area above a small ornate mouth. Bold black outlines frame the shapes, and the piece is coloured in yellow, orange, red, green and teal on a cream background.

Cat Sugar skull Flower Heart Dot Pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lock-keeper at Hatton had given up hurrying Nell Ashby, so she took her time over the cabin door. The brass was polished, the tiller was black with years of hands, and the last job was the one her grandmother had insisted on: a cat on the panel, flowers blooming in its eyes, a heart painted on its nose. Rosa had decorated every boat she ever steered with a bright skull or a bright face, and she used to say the dead liked the way home painted lively.

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Ferrol, a grey tom who had ridden the cut since he was a kitten, sat on the front deck with his tail wrapped round his paws and watched the brush the way he watched pigeons. Each stroke of teal went down slow. Water slapped the hull. A hire boat drifted past, and a child in a red hat shouted that the cat on the door was a ghost. Nell laughed and said the ghost was only a cat who had eaten too many sardines.

By dusk the panel was finished except for the heart. She mixed vermilion with a drop of marigold and held the brush over the wood for a long time. Rosa had always said the heart was the one part you could not paint for someone else. Nell thought of the call from the hospice in Leamington, and of the keys still sitting in the saucer by the sink where her grandmother had left them.

She finished the heart and stepped back. The painted cat looked out from the door exactly like the one on the deck, except that the real Ferrol had climbed down to sniff the wet paint. He left one perfect pawprint on the towpath, orange as a lantern, and went off along the bank without looking back.