Pencil sketch of a striped tiger descending head first with its tail curled at the top, shown as a tattoo design with no body placement visible.

Descending tiger pencil sketch

Black and grey · Flash

A pencil drawing of a tiger shown head first, with its front paws reaching down and its long tail curling into a loose spiral at the top. The linework uses soft, varied strokes with shading along the body and face. The image is black and grey on a plain white background, with the figure centred and filling most of the vertical frame.

Tiger Tail Paw Claw Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The bridge at Hollin Ford had been washed out for three winters, so when the tiger came down the cliff path that October, the ferryman Ansel Required nothing more than a lantern and a long pole to see her across. She did not look at him. She came down the rock head first, the way a cat comes down a wall it has no intention of climbing back up, and her forepaws found the mud beside his boat as neatly as a clerk setting down ink pots.

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He had heard the stories from the mill girls: a tiger that walked the high road between the salt pans and the orchard, that took no sheep, that left the wells alone, that sat at the crossroads in the evenings with her tail wound round her feet like a rope left coiled on a deck. Nobody in Hollin believed the stories and nobody walked the high road after dark.

He poled her over the black water. Halfway across she spoke, in a voice like a cart rolling over gravel. "Your lantern is too bright. Every fish in the river has seen you coming."

"Then the fish can stay out of my way," Ansel said, and she laughed, a low sound that rattled the oars.

On the far bank she leapt, and the boat rocked, and when he had steadied it she was already climbing, her tail unspooling up the cliff like smoke going the wrong way. At the top she turned, looked down, and dropped her great striped head as if to bow. He raised the lantern. The light caught her eyes, and then she was gone into the orchard, and the coiled tip of her tail lay for a moment on the edge of the rock before it too slid out of sight.