Black line drawing of a cat face in sugar skull style, with swirling ornamental patterns, a diamond motif on the forehead and detailed eyes.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull cat face design

Black and grey · Flash

A symmetrical cat face is drawn in bold black outline and filled with ornamental detail. Swirls, dots, petal-like scrolls and a central diamond shape decorate the head, ears and muzzle, while the eyes are shaded with fine hatching. The image is a plain black and white line drawing on a white background with no shading or colour.

Cat Sugar skull Swirl Diamond Eye Ornament

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 cat had been dead nine days when Mercy Hale finally took the lamp black and the flour paste out of the bosun's locker. Nobody aboard the Constance Ruth argued much. The bosun said the sea would have her, the cook said the sea could wait, and Mercy said nothing at all. She sat on an upturned bucket with a pot of water and a stiff brush, drawing a cat's face on a square of old hatch board.

Keep reading

She worked the way her grandmother had taught her, in a village where the dead were fed sweet bread and given back their faces for one night a year. The ears went first, lifting into scrolls like the curl of a wave. Then the eyes, two sharp almonds ringed with dots. Between the brows she set a diamond, small and hard, and the men who had mocked her gathered round to watch the lines close up. She put one swirl down for every night the ship had been at sea since Valparaiso.

Off the Horn the sea came green over the bulwarks and tore the galley door clean away. Mercy lashed the board to the mainmast with her own belt and sat beside it all night while the water roared past. In the grey morning the men found her still there, salt crusted on her lashes, the painted face above her untouched, the diamond catching what little light the clouds allowed.

They docked in Bristol on a wet Tuesday. The agent paid off the crew, the cook carried his wages to the nearest public house, and Mercy hung the board on the nail above the stove where the cat had slept. Before she left, the bosun stood in the doorway and asked whether the thing was for luck. She told him it was for keeping count, and that the swirls were still one short.