Tattooed hands resting on a white cat, with a colour traditional shell design and roses on the hand and arm and a grey etched design on the back of the other hand.

Tattooed hands petting a white cat

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two tattooed hands rest on a white cat lying on its back, with a gold wristwatch on one wrist. The upper hand has a colour traditional-style shell or wave design on the back, with small black letters on the fingers and a cross and symbol near the knuckles, and rose tattoos continue up the forearm. The lower hand carries a black and grey design with fine hatched linework and radiating marks, and the image is taken from above with soft natural light.

Traditional Hand Forearm Cat Hand Shell Rose Cross Watch Script

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

Pilot had gone over on his back the moment the rain started, four white paws in the air as if he were surrendering to the weather. I stood at the galley hatch with a tin of condensed milk in one hand and a ladle in the other, and told him he had eaten already. He didn't care what I thought of his manners, only what I was holding.

Keep reading

The Dorothy Vane was eleven days out of Hull with a hold of pig iron and a cook who could not keep a cat off the stores. The men called Pilot a bad omen. Halloran, the bosun, had a scallop shell inked on the back of one hand and a wave on the other, and he swore the cat had come aboard in a sea chest the week the second mate went over the side. Halloran was the only one who could stroke Pilot without being raked for it. He used the flat of his palm, slow, the way you would smooth a sail before folding it.

On the twelfth night the glass fell hard. Halloran came down to the galley with his watch stopped and asked me to hold the cat while he went up to the wheel. I didn't understand until the lamp swung and the deck tipped and Pilot's claws came out against my wrist. Halloran reached over and pressed his palm to the white belly, knuckles marked with a small cross, and the cat went still as a loaf. "Keep him low and keep him warm," he said. "Cats know the sea before we do."

We raised Lerwick at dawn with the iron intact and the cat asleep in the bosun's empty bunk. The paint on the shell had cracked across one knuckle where a wave had broken over him years before. When I asked why he had never had it mended, he only shrugged and said the sea had taken what it was owed, and Pilot was the one thing aboard it hadn't got.