Tabby is not a breed, which changes what you are actually planning.
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Tabby cat breeding starts from an awkward fact: there is no such thing as a tabby. Not as a breed, anyway. Tabby is the pattern the domestic cat started with, and every cat alive still carries the genes for it. Some cats show it and some hide it. The cats listed above are tabbies whose owners are looking for a match, and what their kittens end up looking like comes down to four genes.
What actually decides your kittens’ pattern
Read the third row twice. A ticked cat carries stripes or swirls like any other cat, and you cannot see which. It is the one parent that regularly produces a litter nobody predicted.
Short answer
More reliably than for almost any other look, because tabby is the default rather than a special case. What you cannot control is which tabby you get, and you cannot rule out a solid kitten unless you know what both parents carry.
The pattern shows up when a kitten inherits at least one agouti copy of the ASIP gene. Agouti is the version that lets each hair grow with pale bands along its length, and those bands are what make the markings visible against the background. The solid version is a two-base-pair deletion in the same gene, identified in 2003.[4] It is recessive, so a cat needs two copies of it to look solid.
That single fact does most of the practical work. A tabby cat can be carrying one hidden solid copy without any sign of it. Mate two of those cats together and roughly one kitten in four inherits the solid version from both sides and is born without visible markings. The reverse almost never happens. Two solid parents have no agouti copy between them to pass on, so a patterned kitten from that mating usually means orange is involved.
A DNA test for the agouti gene is cheap and widely available, and it removes the guesswork completely. If a specific pattern is the point of the mating, test both cats before you plan it rather than reasoning backwards from a litter that already arrived.
Short answer
Stripes beat swirls. Mackerel is dominant to classic, so a swirled cat needs two copies of the classic version. Ticking beats both, and spotted is the one nobody has fully worked out yet.
The gene that decides stripes or swirls is called Taqpep, and the 2012 paper that found it states the inheritance directly: “mackerel is dominant to blotched”, blotched being the formal name for the classic swirled pattern.[1] Three separate mutations in that gene turn the narrow stripes into wide swirls. The same gene, broken the same way, is what turns a cheetah’s spots into the thick stripes of the rare king cheetah.
The swirled pattern is not new. It had already spread widely enough by the eighteenth century that Linnaeus described it in 1758 as characteristic of the domestic cat.[1] The mackerel striping is the older look, and it is what the Old World wild cats that domestic cats came from still wear.
The four patterns, and how predictable each one is
The 2012 study that settled mackerel and classic did not resolve spotted as a separate gene, and nothing since has. Anyone quoting you a clean inheritance rule for spotted is guessing.
Ticking is the row that catches breeders out. The gene behind it, DKK4, sits above Taqpep in the chain, which means a ticked cat still carries stripes or swirls but shows neither.[2] You cannot read that cat’s genotype off its coat at all. Mate it to a non-ticked cat and the hidden pattern can reappear in the kittens.
Short answer
Because the pattern is still there. The solid version of the agouti gene takes away the pale banding on each hair, not the markings underneath. What is left shows up in strong light and breeders call it ghost markings.
This is the part that makes sense of everything above. A solid cat is not a cat without a pattern. It is a tabby whose background has gone dark, so the markings and the space between them are now the same colour. Turn that cat side-on in bright sun and you can often trace the whole pattern it would have worn.
The timing goes further than most people expect. Researchers looking at cat embryos found the pattern already marked out in the skin at developmental stages 15 and 16.[2] That is before pigment cells reach the skin, and before any hair follicle has formed. The layout is decided first and the coat fills it in afterwards. By the time a kitten is born with visible stripes, those stripes were mapped weeks earlier.
For a breeder, the practical takeaway is short. Ghost markings on a solid cat tell you what pattern it is carrying, which is genuinely useful when you are planning a mating and have not run a DNA test. A solid cat with visible ghost swirls is carrying classic.
Short answer
Orange sits on the X chromosome, which is why most orange cats are male and why tortoiseshell and calico cats are almost always female. The mutation behind it was only pinned down in 2025, and every red cat shows markings somewhere.
Two research groups published the answer on the same day in May 2025, working independently. Sex-linked orange is a five-kilobase deletion that switches on a gene called ARHGAP36 in pigment cells where it does not normally run, which shifts the cat from black pigment to red.[3] Cat genetics had been waiting on that answer for roughly a century, partly because no other mammal has an equivalent.
Because the gene sits on the X chromosome, the inheritance is lopsided in a way that matters when you plan a mating. A male cat has one X, so he is either orange or he is not. A female has two, and a female carrying orange on one X and not the other becomes tortoiseshell, or calico once white is added. That is why a tortoiseshell male is a genuine rarity rather than a marketing line.
Red and cream cats always show some marking, most obviously on the face, legs and tail.[7] Published sources describe the interaction between orange and agouti differently, so trust what you can see rather than the mechanism. That part is still being argued about. A solid orange cat with no markings anywhere does not exist.
One claim worth dropping
Orange cats are widely said to be friendlier, or dimmer, or both. The 2025 research is the definitive account of what the orange mutation does, and it is entirely about pigment chemistry. It makes no claim about behaviour of any kind.[3] Nothing in the genetics supports picking a cat for temperament by its colour.
Short answer
No. There is no Tabby breed to register a cat into. You register whatever breed sits under the pattern, and if there is no breed under it, the Household Pet class is where that cat belongs.
The Cat Fanciers’ Association makes the point in an article titled, without much ambiguity, A Pattern Does Not a Breed Make. Colours and patterns describe the coat, and a coat does not tell you the breed.[5] The same piece gives the number that puts the whole question in proportion: only about five percent of all domestic cats are of any recognised breed. The other ninety-five percent belong to no breed at all.
That is not a gap in the system. CFA runs a Household Pet class specifically for non-pedigreed cats over four months old, judged on condition, appearance and personality, where every colour and pattern is accepted.[6] A tabby with no papers is not a lesser cat there. It is the cat the class was built for.
Where this bites is the paperwork you can offer a kitten buyer. If both parents are registered cats of a recognised breed, the kittens can be registered as that breed and the tabby pattern is recorded as a coat description. If they are not, the kittens are random-bred cats with a tabby coat, which is a perfectly good thing to be and cannot be sold as a pedigree.
Our own listings show how deep the confusion runs. Petmeetly stores Tabby as a breed value because owners pick it from the app dropdown, and one live breeding listing reads: “her father was orange but for some reason orange tabby wasnt an option for drop down menu”. That owner is describing a coat and reaching for a breed field, which is exactly the mix-up this page exists to clear up.
Short answer
Whatever the cat’s actual breed calls for. No documented health condition tracks the tabby pattern, so there is no tabby test list. Start from what the cat is rather than from what its coat looks like.
The four genes on this page shape pigment. Nothing in the published work links any of them to a health problem, which is a real difference from some other coat traits where colour and health do travel together. So the screening question is not “what do tabbies need”. It is “what is this cat, and what does that require”.
Everything that comes after the mating is the same for a tabby as for any other cat, so this page does not repeat it. Our domestic shorthair breeding guide covers pregnancy, birth, raising a litter and what it costs, and that is the right place to read next if you are going ahead.
Short answer
If the reason is the coat, think again. Tabby is the most common pattern there is, so the kittens will not be rare. Nobody can charge a premium for a pattern most cats already have.
Reasons to stop and reconsider
None of that argues against breeding a cat you have thought about properly. It argues against breeding one because the coat looks nice in a photograph. If the honest answer turns out to be no, spaying or neutering costs a fraction of a litter and takes the question off the table for good.
An adult cat that already exists is also a better match for many households than a kitten, and there are always tabbies looking. You can adopt or rehome a tabby cat through the same platform, or read what buyers are actually paying for on our tabby kittens for sale page.
Petmeetly connects owners to each other. If you do go ahead, the first honest step is finding out what your cat actually is. The second is finding an owner who checks as carefully as you do.
No registry recognises a Tabby breed. Tabby is a coat pattern that turns up in dozens of breeds and in most random-bred cats. The Cat Fanciers’ Association puts the scale of it plainly: only about five percent of all domestic cats belong to any recognised breed at all.
Yes, and it happens often. The markings only show when a kitten inherits at least one copy of the agouti version of the gene. Two tabby parents that each carry a hidden copy of the solid version will produce a solid kitten roughly one time in four.
Usually no. Solid is the recessive version, so two solid parents have nothing else to pass down. Orange is the exception, because it sits on a different gene and lets markings show through whatever the agouti pair would otherwise do.
Mackerel, the narrow vertical striping, is dominant to classic, the wide swirled pattern. That comes from the 2012 study that identified Taqpep as the gene behind both. A classic tabby needs two copies of the classic version to show it.
Ticked hides everything else. The gene behind ticking, DKK4, sits above Taqpep, so you cannot tell whether a ticked cat is carrying stripes or swirls by looking at it. Its kittens can show a pattern nobody in the mating expected.
Because the pattern never left. The solid version of the agouti gene is a two-base-pair deletion, and it removes the pale banding along each hair rather than the markings underneath. What you can still see in strong light is called ghost markings.
Before it has any hair. Researchers found the pattern already mapped out in fetal skin at stages 15 and 16, before pigment cells reach the skin and before a single hair follicle forms. The coat that grows later is following a plan drawn much earlier.
Every red or cream cat shows markings somewhere, most obviously on the face, legs and tail. Published sources describe the underlying mechanism differently, so treat what you can see as the reliable part. There is no such thing as a red cat with no markings at all.
There is no evidence for it. The 2025 research that finally identified the orange gene, a five-kilobase deletion affecting ARHGAP36, is about pigment chemistry and says nothing at all about behaviour. Coat colour is not a personality test.
Not as a Tabby. You register whatever breed sits underneath the pattern, if there is one. If there is not, the CFA Household Pet class takes non-pedigreed cats over four months old, and every colour and pattern is accepted in it.
No documented health condition tracks the tabby pattern. The genes involved shape pigment and nothing else that has been recorded. Screening should follow the individual cat and whatever breed sits underneath, not the coat on top.
The ones the cat’s actual breed calls for, plus the basics any mating needs. Because tabby is not a breed, there is no tabby test list to work from. Start from what the cat is, not from what its coat looks like.
Sources
Fact-checked against peer-reviewed feline genetics in Science, Nature Communications and Current Biology, and against the CFA registration and show rules.
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Florida, US
Nothing more to add — the platform is great, and I found it very helpful for my needs
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Victor was an amazing match, and his owner was super helpful and accommodating!
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