However, the legs, tail and face sport very thin stripes. The coat on the body has almost no stripe. The fourth tabby coat pattern is called ticked or agouti. The spotted tabby has distinct round spots against a background of lighter fur. Photography by Tierfotoagentur | Alamy Stock Photo.ģ. The mackerel tabby has either continuous or broken stripes running perpendicular to the spine, like a fishbone. The classic tabby coat, sometimes called blotched, has wide, dark stripes curving over the flanks and the shoulders and three large stripes running from the shoulder blades to the base of the tail. Photography ©VladislavStarozhilov | Thinkstock.ġ. 4 tabby coat patterns A classic or blotched tabby cat. And, it’s easy to understand how a coat with stripes and spots could camouflage well into natural surroundings. Research done by feline geneticists Carlos Driscoll and Leslie Lyons at the beginning of this millennium confirmed five genetic clusters, or lineages, of wildcats from various parts of the world (such as Africa, Europe, China, Central Asia and the Middle East) and dating back some 10,000 years to be the ancestors of today’s ubiquitous domestic tabbies.

The tabby pattern is determined by the agouti gene, which causes the individual hairs to have bands of light and heavy pigmentation, and the tabby gene, which denotes the type of tabby patterns, namely stripes, blotches or spots of hairs of solid color.

White mackerel tabby cat