Watercolour-style tattoo of a cat's face with blue eyes, orange and purple washes and loose black linework on the forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour cat eyes on a forearm

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A cat's face is built from loose blue-eyed features, with whiskers drawn in fine black lines and sketchy strokes around the eyes and nose. Soft orange, purple and red washes bleed outwards, with black ink splatters scattered across the design. The tattoo sits on the forearm against a plain skin background and a wooden surface.

Forearm Cat Cat face Whiskers Animal

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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 cat came in through the laundry hatch the week the boiler failed, and nobody on the night rota could say who had let it in. It was thin and grey, with eyes that changed colour depending on where it sat. Dilys, the night porter at Hollin Cross, noticed this first. Blue by the nurses' station under the strip lights, orange beside the sluice where the pipes ran hot, and a deep bruised purple in the wash bay when the door was left open to the rain. She told no one but the cleaners, and the cleaners told no one, because they had seen stranger things in that building and had learned to keep their mouths shut.

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It went every night to bed nine, where Tobias Renn lay with his face turned to the wall. He had been a ferryman on the river before his chest gave out, and since March he had not said a word to anyone. The cat sat on the blanket over his feet and watched his breathing the way Dilys watched the clock. The sister on the ward wrote its visits in the log as a draught, and then as a nuisance, and then she stopped writing about it at all.

At a quarter to six the boiler coughed back into life and the corridor filled with yellow light. Tobias opened his eyes and asked, in a voice like a rope drawn over a cleat, for a cup of tea. When Dilys brought it he told her he had been standing on the wrong bank of the water, and a grey cat had walked out across the shallows ahead of him, looking back to make sure he followed.

The bed was empty of cat. On the windowsill were four small black spots of wet ink, and beside them a single orange smear, as if something had brushed past with a paw still damp from the colour.