Colourful neo-traditional style tattoo of a sugar skull cat with crossed bones, scissors, a comb and autumn leaves on an upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Sugar skull cat with autumn leaves on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A sugar skull with cat ears and a bow sits at the centre, decorated with swirls, a red heart and a sunflower over the eye. Crossed bones, a comb and a pair of scissors sit below, surrounded by orange, yellow and red autumn leaves. Bold outlines and smooth, saturated colour shading give the piece a glossy finish across the upper arm.

Neo-trad Upper arm Sugar skull Cat Skull Bone Scissors Leaves Autumn Sunflower Heart

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 barber on Skerra kept a black cat named Ness, who slept on the counter between the combs and the razors and only got up when the ferry came in. Every autumn the rowan leaves turned all at once, and the old people said the island was growing its hair out for winter and needed trimming before the gales.

Keep reading

Mairi Gunn came in one October with a comb in her apron pocket and a bundle of grey hair wrapped in string. She had buried her husband in the spring and wanted his hair cut from the house, so that the sorrow would stop clinging to the doorframes. The barber, Alasdair, had a bad hand that week, so he lifted the scissors and passed them down to Ness. The cat took the blades carefully in her teeth, the way she carried mice, and snipped the string in one clean stroke.

The grey hair blew out the door and caught in the rowan, and the leaves came down red and gold over the path after it. Mairi laughed for the first time since the funeral and said the cat had a better hand than the barber. Alasdair did not argue. He swept up the mess and left the comb on the step for the wind to take.

That night Ness sat on the windowsill with a ribbon at her throat, facing the sea, while the harbour lights came on one by one. In the morning Alasdair found the scissors wiped clean and laid beside a herring's skeleton on the step, and he took that to mean the bargain was settled.