How rare is my cat's coloring?

My Tikva has a rather unusual coat. She has seamless patches of brown-tabby stripes and red-tabby stripes (Exhibit A). And calico bits on her face and feet. I can’t recall ever seeing a cat with two different types of stripes before. Mind you, I don’t see a lot of torbies in general (and a Google search of ‘torbie’ did turn up some similar cases). Is Tikva a rare specimin, or will she have to just content herself with being the most beautiful cat in the world?

I didn’t realized that tabby tortoise shell cats are now being called “torbies.” I think the newness of the term is why you aren’t getting a lot of hits on google.
Calico and tortoise shell cats are very popular. As a veterinary tech, I’ve probably seen at least one cat a week with the same coat pattern as your kitty.

Of course, yours is the most beautiful one of all :wink:

She looks a lot like my mother’s cat, Sassy. So I doubt her coloring is terribly rare.

She’s beautiful!

Not rare, but her particular pattern is bold and striking.

Here, we call tabbies like that, “patched tabby”. Like Calicos, the orange patches on top of a tabby pattern seem to be almost exclusively female. Boys who have the same kind of orange patches tend to be very … odd … personality-wise, and I think of all the thousands of cats I’ve met, maybe only two colored like that were male.

I had a calico-torbie until very recently, white on the face, chest, belly and feet, with solid orange patches above the white, orange and black tortie body and tail, with the tabby M on her head and a couple striped patches on her legs. I enjoyed thinking of her as rare, but I’ve seen a few others who were similar.

That’s likely because male calicos are Klinefelter’s syndrome cats ( or the equivalent, since that refers to humans ) - i.e. they are XXY, instead of the normal XY. They’re typically sterile and anecdotally I knew one that seemed to have congenital neourological issues ( mild trouble in maintaining its balance ).

As to the OP, she may not be that uncommon, but she is gorgeous :). I assume the red to dark stripe patchiness is some sort of random polygenetic influence, rather than any of the discrete gene variations, like the color inhibitor trait. But I can’t say for certain, as that sort of variation is just a bit beyond my meager competence on the topic.

Buut here’s a good primer on cat coat genetics: Cat Coat Color Genetics & Prospective Mating Prediction - Tenset

We had a cat when I was a kid, Elizabeth Jane, who looked spookily like your cat, Malleus.

She is way more beautiful than the carpet on that stairway!

Is that what they’re called? Hmm.

I may have one, too.