A fresh colour tattoo of an orange, red, yellow and black striped design on a man's chest, being wiped by a tattooist's hand.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Fresh colour tattoo on the chest

Chest · Colour · Photo

A close view of a bearded man's upper chest with a freshly applied tattoo on the left side of the image. The design uses soft shading and orange, red and yellow ink with black striping, suggesting animal fur. The skin is slightly reddened and wiped, and a tattooist's hand holding tissue is visible at the left edge.

Chest Stripe

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the wind is listening and I will not tell this twice. Up past the last larch above Harrow Col, where the path goes grey with ice, there came a tiger one winter, and it was hungry the way only a thing that has walked too far is hungry.

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Ilse Marr kept goats on the high meadow that year, and she saw it come down through the snow with its head low. Its coat was the colour of her mother's hearth fire, orange deepening to red along the flanks, and across it ran bands of black like the shadows the pines throw at dusk. She had no knife, only a lantern and a heel of bread. So she sat down in the snow and broke the loaf in two and waited.

The tiger did not eat her. It looked at the lantern for a long time, then lay down beside her, and wherever its fur touched the ground the snow went gold and soft. Each morning the stripes seemed darker, and the goats grew fat on grass that should have been buried. Her father swore the beast was taking the autumn off the larches to carry it over the pass, and perhaps it was.

When the thaw came, the tiger was gone, and a band of red bare earth wound over the col where it had lain, stripe after stripe, as if the mountain had been marked. My grandmother walked that path every spring. Some say the stone there is still warm to the palm. I have never been brave enough to lie down on it and see.