Two black and grey cat head tattoos side by side on the lower legs, a hairless cat on the left and a tabby cat on the right, both in stippled dotwork shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Two cat heads on the calves

Dotwork · Calf · Black and grey · Photo

Two cat heads sit side by side on the lower legs, one a hairless sphynx-style cat and the other a tabby with striped fur, each framed by dark leafy shading below the chin. The linework is fine and the fur and facial features are built up with dense dots and stippling, giving soft tonal depth. The palette is entirely black and grey, and the two designs are placed symmetrically with matching scale.

Dotwork Realism Calf Cat Sphynx cat Tabby cat Cat head Leaves Foliage

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Dad was on his knees in the runner beans when the hairless one came through the gap in the fence, shivering like a wet glove, and walked straight past him to the warm flags under the rhubarb. Marjorie, the tabby, watched from the top of the water butt with her tail making its slow hook, the one she uses before she decides whether to start a fight.

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We called him Pudding because Mum said he looked like a bowl of cold custard with ears. Nobody had ever told him he was a cat. He had slept in the potting shed since August, and Marjorie had decided, without consulting anyone, that the shed belonged to her. Every evening they fell out over the same wheelbarrow, one at each end, hissing across the handles like the bookends on Mum's shelf.

The frost came early that October and Dad carried Pudding indoors wrapped in a tea towel. He was back out by dawn, sitting on the compost heap with his ears folded flat. When Dad went out with the torch he found both cats curled nose to nose inside the cold frame, Marjorie's tail looped round the bald one's ribs, the two of them staring up at the lettuces as if they had been waiting for him to notice.

Dad didn't say anything. He just went back inside for a second blanket. Later I stood at the kitchen window with the kettle going, and the pair of them were still there, one black and one striped, lying in the only patch of sun the garden had left.