Black and grey tattoo of a curled tabby cat with a hand shape over its back, placed on the side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tabby cat tattoo on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised cat in profile curls around a hand shape on the side of the ribs. The tabby stripes and body are built from fine stippled dots and soft grey shading, with crisp dark edges along the outline. The tattoo is centred on a light skin area, with a maroon cardigan and a light bra visible around it.

Dotwork Ribs Cat Tabby cat Hand

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 tabby came up the road from Sallow Crossing on the third day of the dust wind, walking down the middle of the tarmac as if it had been laid for her. Nobody at the filling station claimed her. Tomas Ebb, who kept the pumps and the only ledger for four hundred miles, wrote her down as a stray and set out a saucer of milk he could not spare.

Keep reading

She would not drink it. She sat on the step and watched the east road, where the heat lifted the far hills into the sky, and each dusk she curled herself tight against the boots of whoever stood nearest the pumps, as though she were keeping something warm in place. The drivers laughed at her. Old Dorrie, who had buried two husbands along that road, said a cat that curls around a hand is asking the hand to stay.

Tomas's granddaughter Ines was seventeen and leaving on the morning bus for the coast. She let the cat sleep against her wrist the night before. At dawn the cat would not uncurl, and when Ines finally worked her hand free, the tabby looked at the bus, then at the empty road, and sat down again on the step, wrapped around nothing.

Ines came back at the next dust wind with a sack of salt and a letter folded small. She found the cat still on the step, thinner, and sat beside it until the stars came out. Tomas never learned what the letter said. He only noticed in the morning that the saucer was empty, and that the tabby had turned her face to the west, toward the coast road.