Realistic colour tattoo of a snarling black panther head with yellow eyes, sitting on the calf.

Black panther head on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A close photograph of a black panther's head shown full front, with bared teeth, whiskers and glowing yellow eyes. The fur is rendered in layered blues and near-black with soft highlights, set against a loose yellow and orange wash that fades into the skin. The head fills the centre of the frame and the leg curves around it.

Realism Calf Panther Big cat Eye Whiskers Teeth Animal portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The barge Marigold had been tied to the Kennet wall for nine days when the panther came down the towpath at dusk, and nobody aboard had seen one before, not even old Tobias Marr, who had worked the Thames locks since before the war and claimed to have seen everything the river carried.

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It did not come close. It sat on the cinder path with its tail wrapped round its front feet and watched the lamp in the cabin window, and when the bargewoman, Ada Pim, went out with a pail of ash, it only turned its head, slow as a lock gate, and showed her its teeth. Its eyes were the yellow of the last light on the water. The fur was so dark it looked wet, blue at the edges where the lamp caught it.

Ada came back in and said nothing for an hour. Then she took the tin of pilchards from the shelf, opened it on the step and set it down. In the morning the tin was empty and the panther was gone, but there were prints in the mud by the mooring ring, each one as wide as a dinner plate, and they went north along the bank toward the weir.

Tobias said the river had been owed something for a long time and the cat had come to collect. Ada said the river owed nobody anything and the cat could fetch its own. They cast off on the tide, and for the rest of that summer, whenever the barge tied up after dark, a pair of yellow lamps would be waiting on the bank, patient as a tally clerk, watching to see who would share their supper.