Colour tattoo of a decayed zombie cat character with a pink bow and two bats on the upper arm, in a neo-traditional style.

Zombie cat with bats on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A cartoon cat character with a pink bow and rounded head is shown with one side of its face and body decayed to reveal a skeletal skull and ribcage. Two small bats sit above the head. The linework is bold with soft grey shading and pink, red and pale blue accents, and the design sits centrally on the arm against a blurred indoor background.

Neo-trad Upper arm Cat Zombie Skull Skeleton Bat Bow Ribcage

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

Nobody in Hollin Bank would claim the cat, so she claimed the colliery instead. You fed her at the lamp-room door each morning, pilchard from a tin and a scrap of pink ribbon knotted at her ear, because Mrs Teale said a pit cat ought to look respectable. She sat on the winding wheel and watched the cages go down like a foreman, and every man who passed touched his cap to her before he touched his own lamp.

Keep reading

The winter the seam flooded, she went missing for nine days. Mrs Teale said she had gone to the dead, which was the sort of thing Mrs Teale said. You stood at the top of number three shaft with your lamp turned down to a bead and heard something scratching up through the wet black. It was her, or what the damp had made of her: half her grey fur gone to bone, one eye a hollow, her ribs showing through like a fence in fog. The pink ribbon was still tight at her ear.

She did not frighten you. She walked straight to the saucer you had left on the step, lapped at it, then turned and looked at you the way she always had, as if you were late. Two bats dropped from the headgear and circled her head like an escort. You understood then what the men had never said aloud: she had been down there all along, counting the tunnels, and she had found the one way out nobody else could.

Hollin Bank still says the cat leads the shift home when the water rises. You do not argue with it. You leave the saucer out each night, and each morning it is empty, and the ribbon on the lamp-room hook is fresh pink, tied in a bow no living hand has ever learned to make.