Black dotwork and fine line tattoo of two curled-up sleeping cats with small stars, enclosed in a circle on the outer forearm.

Two sleeping cats in a circle on a forearm

Dotwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows two cats curled together inside a circular frame, with small four-pointed stars scattered beside them. The outlines are fine and even, and the fur and body shading are built up with stippled dots and short hatched strokes. The design is entirely black and grey on pale skin, and the circle is centred on the forearm.

Dotwork Fine line Forearm Cat Sleeping cat Star Circle

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

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the cold comes up off the canal after midnight and I won't have anyone catching their death before the end. You want the one about the two cats on the chimney of the Lantern Street bakery? Good. Then mind the stars, they're fussy when they're watched.

Keep reading

Ada Kettering kept the bakery ovens, and her ginger tom, Mungo, kept the roof. Her neighbour's grey she-cat, Pell, kept nothing at all and came up every night to steal Mungo's warm patch of tar paper. They fought over it the first winter, yowling until the gulls complained. By spring they had worked out the trick: curl nose to tail, one tucked into the other's curve, until the two of them made a ring so tight the moon could not get a grip on it and rolled off the top of the roof at the hour the first loaves went in.

The stars came down to see. Four-pointed ones, like the crosses on a baker's tally, because they were cheap and nobody had yet sold them to the sky. They sat on the gutter counting the cats' breathing and getting the sums wrong on purpose so they would have an excuse to stay.

Then one night the church clock struck three and Pell did not wake. Mungo lay with his chin on her ear and the whole street held its breath. Ada came up the ladder with a tray of cooling loaves and stood a long while with the heat going out of her hands. Nobody in Lantern Street ever learned whether the cats had slept or simply stayed. What they did learn was that the moon came up round over the bakery every morning after that, and the bread was never once burnt. And if you walk past at three with your collar up, you can still see the two of them, curled tight, keeping the circle shut.