Solid black tribal-style cat design filled with spiral swirls, shown as a flash drawing on a white background with no body placement visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tribal swirl cat design

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A stylised black silhouette of a crouching cat, with its tail curling upward, set on a plain white background. The body is filled with bold, flowing spiral and swirl patterns in a tribal-inspired style, with the open linework of the swirls leaving white areas. The image is entirely black and white, with a centred, single-subject composition.

Blackwork Cat Spiral Swirl Tribal Silhouette

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 is already on the balcony rail when you get the window open, crouched low the way it crouches at the bins, tail lifted and curling over its back like a question nobody has asked yet. Eleven floors of Ashgrove House fall away beneath you, and the wind off the car park smells of wet tarmac and somebody's frying onions. You say the name Mrs Pryce gave it, but Smoke only flattens its ears and looks past you into the dark of the flat.

Keep reading

Mrs Pryce died on Tuesday. The housing officer said someone would come for the cat, and someone has, which is you, because you were the one who knocked on her door every morning with the milk she never drank. You climb over the rail with your heart knocking and reach for the black scruff of its neck, but the cat slips sideways along the rail and drops onto the walkway without a sound, as if the building has been holding it all along.

You follow it down the walkway, past doors with their bikes chained up and their dead geraniums, and it keeps stopping to look back, turning its head so the light catches the spirals drawn across its shoulders. At number fourteen the door stands ajar. Inside, the hall smells of lavender and dust, and the cat goes straight to the armchair by the gas fire and folds itself into the hollow where Mrs Pryce used to sit, tail wrapped round its feet.

You stand in the doorway with the spare key still in your hand. Nobody has told you to keep it. The cat blinks slowly at you, once, the way she used to when she wanted the radio turned down, and you understand you are not being asked to take it anywhere. You close the front door softly behind you and sit on the arm of the chair, and for a while neither of you says anything at all.