• CFA defines a patched tabby as a brown, silver or blue tabby with patches of red or cream, and states the tabby pattern may be spotted, mackerel, classic or ticked.
  • CFA attributes the patching to the sex linked orange gene and says the cat or kitten is most likely female as a result.
  • CFA's practical test is that patches of red or cream, or two different colors on the nose leather or paw pads, mark a cat as a patched tabby rather than a plain tabby.
  • Torbie is a contraction of tortoiseshell and tabby that CFA's Maine Coon standard uses as a parenthetical gloss on patched tabby, CFA's actual color name.
  • The difference from a plain tortoiseshell is agouti: a torbie's dark areas carry visible tabby markings, while a tortoiseshell's dark areas are solid.

What to look at

  1. Confirm red or cream is present somewhere in the coat, which is what makes the cat patched rather than a plain tabby.
  2. Look inside the dark areas for tabby markings, which is what makes the cat a torbie rather than a plain tortoiseshell.
  3. Check the nose leather and paw pads for two different colors, the signal CFA names for telling a patched tabby from a plain one.
  4. Name the tabby pattern underneath, since CFA allows spotted, mackerel, classic or ticked, and the forehead M and leg bars will usually be present in the patterned areas.
  5. Read the ground color. Brown, silver and blue are the tabby grounds CFA lists for the patched tabby, and blue with cream is the dilute version.
  6. Check for white. Add significant white and the description becomes a patched tabby and white, which many people call a calico with stripes.

Three coat traits stacked on one cat

A torbie is the product of three separate things being true at once. First, the cat is agouti, so it expresses a tabby pattern rather than solid color. Second, it carries sex linked orange on one X chromosome and the ancestral allele on the other, so random X inactivation produces the mosaic of red and non red patches that makes a tortoiseshell. Third, the tabby pattern is still expressed in both kinds of patch, so the dark areas carry stripes or swirls and the red areas carry them too. That is why CFA files the result under the tabby colors as a patched tabby rather than under the tortoiseshells, and why the tabby pattern can be spotted, mackerel, classic or ticked.

The name on the paperwork is different

Torbie is a nickname rather than CFA's primary color name. CFA's Coat and Color Descriptions page has no entry for it and reaches the same cat through patched tabby instead, and where the word appears in the Maine Coon standard it appears in brackets, glossing the real color name: patched tabby and white is described as the color of a patched tabby, torbie, with or without white on the face. The individual colors are written out in full, such as blue-silver patched tabby, a pale clear silver ground with deep blue markings and patches of cream. Related nicknames like caliby and tabico appear in no checked CFA color list.

What a photo can and cannot tell you

A photo works well provided the shot is close enough. The presence of red or cream, whether the dark areas carry visible markings, the shape of those markings and the color of the nose leather and paw pads are all visible traits, and they are exactly the checks CFA describes. Distance is the enemy here, because low contrast tabby markings inside a dark patch disappear in a wide shot. What a photo cannot do is name a breed, since patched tabby is a coat description that attaches to many breeds and to unregistered cats. It also cannot confirm sex, though the genetics make female much more likely.

Related guides

Sources