Red tribal-style cat face design on a white background, drawn with bold, flowing linework and no body placement shown.

Tribal cat face design

Colour · Flash

A symmetrical cat face drawn in solid red with tribal-style flowing blades and spikes forming the fur, ears, eyes and whiskers. The linework is bold and uniform, with no shading, and the design is shown on a plain white background. Its composition is centred and fills the frame from the pointed ears down to the ruff of fur at the chin.

Cat Cat face Tribal Animal Design

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cat is sitting on the stile when you come down through the bracken, as though it has been waiting since the frost lifted off the lane. Its fur stands out in sharp red blades from cheek to ruff, and it looks at you the way Mrs Pargeter looks at a loaf that has risen badly: patient, unimpressed, certain you will be the one who has to fix it.

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Holm Ashby keeps a rule older than its church. Before anyone goes into Carrow Wood for kindling, they leave a saucer of milk on the boundary oak, and nobody asks who drinks it. You forgot. The cat drops from the stile and walks ahead of you along the path, its tail a straight red line, and when the trees close over the lane it does not hurry. It stops where the ferns thin and waits for you to catch up, then stops again at each fork, as if it has been keeping a tally of every foot that ever crossed the boundary.

At the hollow ash, where the bell from the tinker's cart still hangs on a nail, the cat sits and washes one paw. You kneel, take the enamel jug from your basket, and pour. The milk is cold. The cat laps at it without looking at you, and the wood goes quiet in the particular way it does when something larger has decided to let you through.

By the time you climb back to the stile, the bracken is grey with evening and the cat is gone. Your bundle of kindling is lighter than when you set out, and the first lamp is lit in Holm Ashby below you. You do not look back at the oak. You know the saucer will be empty by morning, and that someone will have to bring a fresh one next week.