Colour realism tattoo of a kitten's face with blue eyes and watercolour splashes in purple, blue, pink and orange, on a person's upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour kitten on upper back

Realism · Back · Colour · Photo

A kitten's face peeks out from a loose wash of watercolour splashes across the upper back. The fur and eyes are shaded softly with fine whisker strokes, while the surrounding colour blooms outward in purple, blue, pink, orange and green with scattered dark specks. The composition centres the cat's face on the shoulder blade, with the splashes fading into bare skin at the edges.

Realism Back Kitten Cat Eye Whiskers Watercolour Splash

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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

You learned the dye-vats by smell before you learned their names: woad sour and blue in the north vat, madder like iron in the next, and the saffron room that made your eyes water. The works stood at the edge of the city, where the Lycus ran brown under the bridge, and the master dyer kept a grey kitten because the rats had got into the indigo. The kitten had no name yet. You called her Smudge, which the master disliked, and she walked the drying lines with her tail up, leaving blue prints on the linen.

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One evening the master shouted at you over a spilt jar of madder, and you went out to the wall to sulk. The kitten followed, sat down in the runoff from the cistern gutter, then stood and walked the length of the whitewashed wall. Every print bloomed. Violet first, then the green of crushed reed, then orange where the saffron had dried into the stone. By dark the wall held a face: ears pricked, two eyes like wet sky, whiskers flung out in thin lines of ash.

The master came out with a lamp and said nothing for a long while. Then he took the blue jar from the shelf, dipped a fine brush, and drew the lines around her eyes. You expected him to scold. Instead he said that a dyer's work only lasts once someone has to look at it every day.

He sold the wall to a cloth merchant the next spring, and the merchant kept it. You still go past that house on the Lycus road when the saffron is in season, and the kitten's eyes are still looking down at the water.