Look closely at a street cat’s forehead. Often there’s a mark there, a few dark lines that join up into the letter M. That’s a tabby.
People sometimes ask what breed it is. It isn’t one. Tabby is a pattern, and it turns up in pedigree cats and street cats alike, in brown, grey, ginger and cream. It’s also the oldest cat coat there is.
In short
| Is it a breed? | No. It’s a pattern, found in all sorts of cats. |
|---|---|
| The patterns | Mackerel, classic, spotted and ticked. |
| The giveaway | An M on the forehead. |
| Are all gingers tabbies? | Yes, every one. |
| Where it comes from | The striped African wildcat, the ancestor of every pet cat. |
The four tabbies
- Mackerel. Thin stripes running down the sides, like the bones of a fish. It’s the most common tabby, and the original one.
- Classic. Also called blotched. Thick swirls on the sides, often making a round bullseye on each flank.
- Spotted. The stripes are broken up into spots, big or small.
- Ticked. Hardly any stripes on the body at all. Each hair has bands of light and dark, so the coat looks sandy and flecked, like an Abyssinian’s. Look for faint stripes on the legs and tail, and the M is still there.
A cat can also be a tabby and something else. A tortoiseshell or calico with stripes in its patches is often called a torbie, or a patched tabby.
The genes that draw the stripes
The pattern is laid down long before a kitten has any colour. When the kitten is only a few millimetres long inside its mother, its skin forms a hidden map of thicker and thinner patches. Weeks later, fur grows dark over the thick patches and light over the thin ones. A few genes decide how the map looks:
- Agouti is the on switch. It lets each hair grow in light and dark bands, which is what makes the pattern show. A cat with two switched-off copies is a solid colour, like a black cat. The stripes are still there underneath, and you can sometimes see them as ghost stripes on a black kitten in the sun.
- Taqpep decides stripes or swirls. In 2012, scientists showed that a change in this gene turns mackerel stripes into classic swirls. The same gene turns a cheetah’s spots into the big blotches of the rare king cheetah.
- Dkk4 makes the ticked tabby. In 2021, the same team found that when this gene stops working, the dark marks don’t vanish. They shrink and crowd together until they look like flecks.
What breaks stripes into spots is still a mystery. “There are still other genes,” said Gregory Barsh, who led the work at Stanford and HudsonAlpha.
Every ginger is a tabby
The Agouti switch only works on black and brown colour. Orange fur ignores it, so a ginger cat can’t hide its pattern the way a black cat can. Every ginger cat is a tabby, even if the stripes are faint. There’s more on the orange gene in why most ginger cats are male.
The legends of the M
The M is simply where the stripes on a cat’s face meet. But it’s too good a mark not to have stories, and several religions and countries have one. These are folk tales, told with love, not history:
- Mary. A Christian story says a tabby curled up beside the baby Jesus in the manger to keep him warm, and Mary stroked its forehead in thanks, leaving her initial.
- Muhammad. Another tale says the Prophet loved a cat called Muezza, and his gentle hand on the cat’s forehead left the mark.
- Egypt. Some say the M is for mau, an ancient Egyptian word for cat.
Even the word has a story. “Tabby” comes, through French, from a striped silk once woven in the Attabiya quarter of Baghdad.
The first cat coat
Every pet cat descends from the African wildcat, Felis lybica, which still lives across Africa and the Middle East. It’s a sandy, striped cat that looks a lot like a pale mackerel tabby. When scientists studied the DNA of ancient cats in 2017, they found that the early domestic cats were striped too. The classic swirl only appeared in Southwest Asia in the Middle Ages. Today about 80% of cats carry it, perhaps because people liked a cat they could tell apart from the wild ones.
Some of the oldest evidence of people living with cats comes from Cyprus, where a cat was buried beside a person about 9,500 years ago. Nobody knows what its coat looked like, but the odds say stripes. More in Cyprus, the island of cats.
Tabby isn’t rare. That’s the point of it: it’s the coat every other coat started from. For the ones that are rare, see the rarest cat coats.
Questions people ask
Is a tabby cat a breed?
No. Tabby is a coat pattern of stripes, swirls, spots or flecked hairs, with an M on the forehead. It turns up in many breeds and in street cats everywhere.
Why do tabby cats have an M on their forehead?
It’s where the tabby stripes on the face join up. Folk tales link it to Mary, to the Prophet Muhammad’s cat Muezza, and to the Egyptian word mau, but those are legends.
Are all ginger cats tabbies?
Yes. The gene that can hide the tabby pattern only works on black and brown colour, so a ginger cat always shows its stripes, even if faintly.
Count the tabbies on your street. Snap each one, name it, and see how many kinds you can find: mackerel, classic, spotted or ticked.
