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Sugar skull cat face design

Neo-trad · Colour · Flash

A cat's face is decorated in the style of a Day of the Dead sugar skull, with large teal-irised eyes framed by ringed patterns. Red roses, yellow and blue flowers, scrolls and dotted motifs fill the cream face and ears. The bold outlines and shaded detail are set against a plain black background, with colour ink dominating.

Neo-trad Cat Sugar skull Rose Flower Eye Scroll

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat came aboard at Valparaíso, wet through and furious, and by the time we raised the Horn she had the run of the galley and the rest of us had stopped minding. Cook called her Mrs Dolores because of the paint. Nobody had painted her. The markings were simply there when she first climbed out of the rope locker, cream and sugar-white, with rings of red and teal around her eyes like the frames on a saint's card.

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Our second mate, Harrow, said it was a bad omen to carry a painted-face cat into the Southern Ocean in October. He had his reasons. His brother had gone over the side off the Falklands in a squall nobody saw coming, and Harrow had never liked an animal that looked at him as though it knew the date. Mrs Dolores looked at him that way every morning at the bell.

The sea stayed grey for thirty-one days. The rigging iced, the biscuit went soft, and on the first of November, which Cook insisted on calling the feast of the dead, the cat would not come down from the mizzen crosstree. We left her there and went below, too tired to argue. At the change of watch a single red rose of folded paper lay on the hatch cover, the kind Cook's mother used to make for the graves in Oaxaca, and the wind dropped as if someone had shut a door.

We raised the Falklands two days later under a clean sky. Harrow went up the ratlines himself at dawn with a saucer of milk, and when he came down he said nothing about omens. The cat walked down the gangway at Stanley ahead of the whole crew, tail high, her painted eyes fixed on the harbour lights, and she did not once look back to see whether we were following.