Cat ASCII Art

Tap a piece to copy every line of it: 35 cats drawn for this page, one line to 17, with 10 that keep their shape when a box squashes the spaces.

Cat ASCII Art

/\_/\ ( o.o ) .--(")-(")--. | | | THIS WAY | | UP | '-----------'Cat in a cardboard box7 lines, 13 wideReady to copy

35 pieces. Tap one to copy it.

One line 4

Small, 2 to 4 lines 13

Medium, 5 to 9 lines 14

Large, 10 lines and up 4

Next step The same treatment, for dogs

How it works

Thirty-five pieces of cat text art, drawn for this page and not lifted from an archive: faces, loafs, paw prints, a cat in a mug, a cat asleep on a laptop. They run from one line to 17. Tap a card and the whole piece is copied, line breaks included.

Read the full guide

Pick a cat, tap it

For cat text art copy and paste, start with the sections, which go by height: 4 one-liners, 13 small, 14 medium, 4 large. Fits a comment box marks the 31 within 8 lines and 30 columns, a rule of thumb and no app's promise. Search reads a few extra words too: monday finds the cat hanging off a bar.

When the cat arrives as soup

In a proportional font an i gets less room than an m, so the columns slide apart: switch to a monospaced font where the app offers one. By default a web page also folds a run of spaces into one and drops spaces that start a line. Squash-proof keeps the 10 pieces with no leading space and no two spaces together.

Tips

Cat in a cardboard box comes first because it is editable: paste it, then type over THIS WAY UP with your own words, 9 characters a line at most.
The shortest text art cat is Cat with yarn, one line, at 15 characters. Long cat goes the other way: repeat its two-bar line.
Cat symbol text art in one line of unusual characters, such as ᓚᘏᗢ, is on the cat symbols page.

Questions and answers

Why did the ears vanish when I pasted it?

Something read it as Markdown. In CommonMark a backslash before punctuation is an escape and is not printed, so /\_/\ comes out as /_/. A line starting with > becomes a block quote. 26 of the 35 pieces contain a backslash. Put three backticks on the line above and the line below, or use Cat with no backslash.

Is every ascii art cat here really ASCII?

33 of the 35 are: nothing but the 95 printable ASCII characters. Cat holding a heart holds ♡, White heart suit (U+2661), and Framed cat portrait uses six box drawing characters. Unicode classes all seven as ambiguous in width, and drawn wide they push the frame's right edge out. Keyboard characters only hides both.

Can I paste a cat into a code comment?

Yes, with a catch in C and C++. A backslash at the end of a line joins it to the next before comments are read, so a // comment ending in an ear, /\_/\, takes the following line with it. GCC warns about that under -Wall. 18 pieces have such a line: use a /* */ block comment, or pick from the other 17.

All 35 pieces

One line 4

Cat chasing a mouse A cat, three dashes of speed and a mouse with a tail. Reads left to right. 1 line, 18 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat eyeing a fish A cat, three bubbles and a fish that is swimming the wrong way. 1 line, 19 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat with yarn, one line A cat, a thread of tildes and an @ for the ball. Add tildes to roll it further away. 1 line, 15 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Long cat lying down One cat stretched along one line. Add underscores for a longer cat. 1 line, 20 wide. Keyboard characters only.

Show all 35 pieces (31 more)

Small, 2 to 4 lines 13

Cat holding a heart A pleased face and two paws with a heart held between them. The heart is its one character that is not on a keyboard. 3 lines, 7 wide. Borrows White heart suit (U+2661).
Cat paw print trail Four small prints, left foot then right, heading off to the right. 3 lines, 22 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat peeking over a ledge Wide eyes and two paws over a ledge. Add = signs at both ends to make the ledge longer. 3 lines, 15 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat with a ball of yarn A cat holding the loose end of a ball of yarn. The ball is three lines tall, so a longer thread means nudging all three. 4 lines, 17 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat with a bow tie A three-line face dressed for dinner. The bow tie is the bottom line, and it comes off. 3 lines, 7 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat with no backslash Carets for ears and dots for padding. No backslash, asterisk or underscore, and a CommonMark parser hands it back unchanged. 3 lines, 8 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Plain cat face Ears, eyes, nose and a whisker on each cheek, with nothing else going on. 3 lines, 9 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Sleeping cat loaf Asleep with its paws tucked under and its tail out the back. The z and Z can go without waking it. 4 lines, 16 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Small cat paw print Four toes and a pad in three lines. Small enough to sign a message with. 3 lines, 7 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Squash-proof cat face No spaces anywhere, so there is nothing to squash. 3 lines, 5 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Squash-proof cat in a box Ears over the rim, face and paws inside, and dots where the spaces would be. 4 lines, 11 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Squash-proof cat paw print Dots hold the toes in place, so no line starts with a space. 3 lines, 5 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Squash-proof sleeping cat Asleep, with the z held up by two dots in place of spaces. 3 lines, 12 wide. Keyboard characters only.

Medium, 5 to 9 lines 14

Big cat face A full face with whiskers, six lines tall. Swap each o for a hyphen and it is asleep. 6 lines, 17 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat and a fish bowl A cat, a bowl, one fish and one bubble. The cat has not moved for an hour. 5 lines, 19 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat in a cardboard box Head and both paws over the rim of a box. Type over THIS WAY UP with your own words, 9 characters a line at most. 7 lines, 13 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat in a mug A pleased cat in a mug, paws over the rim, handle on the right. 6 lines, 14 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat in a round basket A sleeping face inside a round basket, seen from the front. The row of dots is the base. 5 lines, 15 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat in a window A cat on the sill of a window with eight panes, paws on the frame. It saw you walk past. 6 lines, 23 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat on the keyboard A cat asleep on a laptop keyboard with the screen behind it. One line of 14 characters fits on the screen. 6 lines, 20 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat paw print Four toe pads over one large pad, drawn with brackets and underscores. 5 lines, 13 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Framed cat portrait A cat face hung in a frame of box drawing characters with rounded corners. 5 lines, 11 wide. Borrows Box drawings light horizontal (U+2500), Box drawings light vertical (U+2502), Box drawings light arc down and right (U+256D), Box drawings light arc down and left (U+256E), Box drawings light arc up and left (U+256F), Box drawings light arc up and right (U+2570).
Long cat A cat that is mostly middle. Repeat the two-bar line until the chat gives up. 8 lines, 8 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Sitting cat Sitting upright, front legs together, tail round to the side. The plain one. 7 lines, 13 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Squash-proof sitting cat A sitting cat with colons for fur instead of spaces, and a tail made of one tilde. 6 lines, 6 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Two cats, one heart Two cats seen from behind, tails meeting to hold up a heart. 29 columns, so it just clears the comment box rule. 6 lines, 29 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Walking cat Side view, mid stride, tail curled over its back. It faces left. 6 lines, 20 wide. Keyboard characters only.

Large, 10 lines and up 4

Big sitting cat A cat that is mostly head, sitting square on with its whiskers out. All outline, nothing filled in. 14 lines, 21 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Black cat silhouette A sitting cat filled in with # signs, eyes left blank, tail up on the right. Swap every # for another character to change the fur. 17 lines, 21 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat hanging on Both paws hooked over a bar and the rest of the cat dangling. Repeat a two-bar line to lengthen the drop. 12 lines, 15 wide. Keyboard characters only.
Cat watching the moon Back view of a cat on a wall under a crescent moon. Delete lines of sky from the top to shorten it. 11 lines, 23 wide. Keyboard characters only.

How this list was compiled: Every piece was drawn for this page and checked in a monospaced font on 2026-09-19; none is copied from an archive or another site. The set covers sitting, sleeping, peeking, walking, hanging on and paw prints, a handful of scenes, four one-liners, and six taller pieces drawn without a single run of spaces. Each character was looked up in the Unicode Character Database, version 18.0.0: names and categories in https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/UnicodeData.txt, width classes in https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/EastAsianWidth.txt, the Emoji property in https://www.unicode.org/Public/18.0.0/ucd/emoji/emoji-data.txt, all read on 2026-09-19. Keyboard characters only means the 95 printable ASCII characters, U+0020 to U+007E. Squash-proof means no line starts with a space and no two spaces touch. The comment box badge means at most 8 lines and 30 columns: a rule of thumb of this site, not a promise about any app. Licence: own work