Every Cat Is a Tabby Underneath

Tabby is not a type of cat and not a breed. It is the ancestral coat pattern of the species, and every domestic cat carries one of its four forms whether or not it is visible.

The four patterns

Mackerel. Narrow vertical stripes running down the sides from a dark line along the spine, like a fish skeleton, which is where the name comes from. The most common and closest to the wild type.

Classic, or blotched. Wide swirling bands with a distinctive bullseye or oyster-shaped mark on each flank. Produced by a recessive variant of the mackerel gene.

Spotted. The stripes broken into spots, which can be small and dense or large and distinct.

Ticked. Almost no body pattern at all, with each hair banded in alternating light and dark. The body looks a plain sandy colour, and the pattern shows only on the face, legs and tail. Abyssinians are the familiar example.

Why solid cats still have one

Solid colour is produced by a separate gene — the agouti gene — which suppresses the banding that makes the pattern visible. The pattern genes are still there, still doing their work, and simply not showing.

Which is why a black cat in strong sunlight frequently reveals faint ghost stripes or swirls. That is the underlying tabby pattern showing through, and it is completely normal.

Kittens show it more clearly than adults, and a solid black kitten with visible tabby markings that fade as it grows is doing exactly what the genetics predicts.

The M

Every tabby has an M-shaped marking on the forehead, and it is one of the most consistent features of the pattern. Folklore has attached various stories to it; the explanation is simply that the pattern converges there.

What none of this indicates

Breed. All four patterns occur across random-bred cats and across many breeds, and a striking pattern is not evidence of pedigree ancestry.

Spotted cats in particular are frequently assumed to be part Bengal. Spotting occurs in ordinary random-bred cats through several genetic routes, and a spotted moggy is far more likely than a Bengal cross, which is the same reasoning as calico, tortie, tabby and tuxedo are not breeds.

Where pattern is informative

Only where it is rare. The ticked pattern is uncommon in random-bred populations and is characteristic of a small number of breeds, so a genuinely ticked cat with no body markings is worth a second look.

Everything else — mackerel, classic, spotted — is common enough to be uninformative, which is the general position on colour and pattern set out across this section.

Torbie and patched tabby

A tortoiseshell cat with tabby markings in the coloured areas is called a torbie or patched tabby. It is a tortoiseshell and a tabby simultaneously, because the two are controlled by unrelated genes.

The same applies to calico: a calico with visible striping in its patches is a calico tabby, and nothing about it is unusual.

This trips people up because the terms sound like alternatives. They are not — coat colour, coat pattern and white spotting are three separate systems that combine freely, which is the point calico, tortie, tabby and tuxedo are not breeds makes.

Silver and smoke

A further gene removes pigment from the base of each hair, producing silver tabbies where the pattern sits on a white ground rather than a warm one, and smokes where a solid-coloured cat shows white at the roots when the fur is parted.

Parting the coat on a very dark cat and finding a pale undercoat identifies a smoke, and it is a satisfying check that takes a second.