Colour tattoo of two cats sitting on a black crescent moon with a red heart and green leaves, placed on the upper back, shown beside a photo of two cat silhouettes at a window.

Two cats on a crescent moon on the upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

The right panel shows a healed colour tattoo on the upper back of a person with a bold black outline: two cats sit on a crescent moon, one pink and one teal, with a red heart, purple flowers and green leaves below. The left panel is a black silhouette photo of two cats looking out of a snowy window, which appears to be the reference for the design. The tattoo is centred against plain skin, and the cats and moon make a clear, balanced circular composition.

Neo-trad Back Cat Crescent moon Moon Heart Flower Leaves Silhouette Window Snow

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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 kiln cracked twice that spring, and by the time the moon rose over the western wall I had given up on firing anything. I climbed to the roof with my brushes and a dish of ochre and sat where the bricks still held the day's heat. My cats came up after me, as they always did once the stars were out. Ansa is the grey one, quick with her paws and quicker with her claws. Heru is the black one, broad and patient, who settles on the parapet as though someone had set him there.

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Tamit from the harbour had ordered a bowl for her daughter's wedding, and she wanted cats on it, sitting on a moon like a fishhook. "Two cats," she had said, tapping the table, "one pink, one blue-green, like the water off Abydos." I told her madder root would give me the pink, and the blue would come from the glaze I bought from a man who never gave his name. I did not tell her the cats would be my own. She would have wanted them lovelier.

So I painted, and the paint did what paint does. Heru's shape bled into the crescent, and I had to chase his tail with the finest brush to find where he ended. Ansa turned her head toward the moon every time I looked away. Late, when the ochre heart was finished and the leaves were green at their edges, I noticed the cats had not once looked at each other. They sat shoulder to shoulder and gazed at the same pale point above the wall, as if the thing holding them there was the thing they watched.

I did not change the bowl. Tamit carried it off on the third morning, wrapped in linen under her arm, and I went back up to the roof. Heru had found the eastern corner, and Ansa, for once, had let him keep it. The moon was thin, nearly gone, and neither of them moved. I stayed until the light came up grey over the wall, and they were still sitting there when I came down.