Traditional style colour tattoo of a circus performer with a red parasol balancing on a tiger, placed on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Circus performer riding a tiger on a thigh

Traditional · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A woman in a frilled red and purple costume balances on one foot atop a leaping tiger, holding a red parasol in one hand. The tiger has black stripes and a feathered green headdress on its saddle cloth, and the bold black outlines are filled with flat, solid colour. The tattoo fills most of the frame against pale skin, with the performer's raised leg and the tiger's curled tail creating a dynamic diagonal composition.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger had been my father's before it was mine, and it still sulked whenever the saddle cloth went on. That September we pitched the big top on the flat grass below Harrowgate Keep, where the walls had been falling down politely for three hundred years. Nobody paid to look at ruins. They paid to watch me ride Majesty through a ring of hay bales, stand on one foot on his shoulders and hold my red parasol up as if I were strolling the promenade on a Sunday.

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The night it went wrong, the wind came off the moor and rattled the canvas like a drum. I woke to a silence where the cat's breathing should have been. Majesty was gone, and so was the gap in the curtain wall. I found him on the broken parapet of the old chapel, tail curled and lashing, one paw on the stone edge and the moon caught behind his ears. He looked at me the way he looked at the ringmaster, with contempt and considerable interest.

Shouting would only make him leap, so I did what Father had taught me. I climbed the rubble with my skirts bunched in one fist, opened the parasol against the wind and hummed the waltz from the first act. Majesty turned his head. The tail uncurled. He stepped down onto the wall as neatly as a man stepping off a tram, and the green plume on his saddle cloth shivered in the dark as though it had been waiting all along.

At dawn the ticket girl asked whether we'd had any trouble with ghosts. I told her the only ghost up there was a tiger who wanted his breakfast. She laughed and sold forty tickets before the first show, and I pinned the feather back into the cloth where it belonged.

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