Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a black and white cat wearing a grey hat with a feather, set inside an ornate gold frame on a calf.

Tuxedo cat in a hat in a gilded frame

Neo-trad · Calf · Colour · Photo

A black and white cat peers out of an ornate gold oval frame, wearing a grey hat with a red band and a grey feather. The cat's fur and face are shaded with soft greys and highlights, with bright yellow-green eyes, while the frame has bold black outlines and scrolled gold detailing. The tattoo sits on a pale calf against a plain wall and pavement background.

Neo-trad Realism Calf Cat Hat Feather Frame Portrait

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 portrait came over on the Thursday boat, wrapped in a bedsheet and smelling of paraffin, and by Friday it had already started to misbehave. You hang it above the dresser in the back room of the Gull and Lantern because Mrs Penhallow insists the frame is worth more than the house, and you do not argue with Mrs Penhallow. Then you notice the cat is no longer looking at the door. It is looking at you, with the faint impatience of a creature who has been painted into a hat it did not choose.

Keep reading

The hat is grey, with a red band and one long feather that Mrs Penhallow says belonged to a heron shot off the Nab in 1911. The brass plate on the frame names the cat Admiral. Nobody on Skerrow remembers an Admiral. Nobody remembers the painter either, only that he came over with a bag of brushes and left owing for six weeks of fish.

On the third night the frame is empty of everything except the cat's left ear, which twitches when you pass with the lamp. By the fourth morning Admiral is sitting on the windowsill, licking a paw beside a row of mussel shells, and the hat is on the back of the chair, neatly, as if he had been asked to leave it there.

You do not tell Mrs Penhallow. You set a saucer of milk beside the frame, which is still gold, still ornate, still perfectly ordinary apart from a small wet paw-print on the varnish. Something in the portrait has decided it is finished being looked at. Good, you think, and pour the milk.