Colour geometric tattoo of a tiger's head on the outer forearm, built from pink, teal, orange and black facets.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric tiger head on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A tiger's head faces forward, drawn from angular, faceted shapes with black stripes across the forehead and cheeks. The linework is bold and the shading is made of flat planes of colour rather than smooth gradients. Pink dominates the ears and upper head, with teal and orange on the lower face, set against the skin of a forearm with a white top and denim visible behind it.

Geometric Forearm Tiger Big cat Animal Face

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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

You have the ladder braced against the Palais wall by six, the paint tin hooked on the top rung, and Mr Oakes below shouting that the tiger must be up before the Saturday queue reaches the bus stop. The poster is for the Tangerine Tigers, a seven-piece from Bradford who play the same three waltzes every week and call it a repertoire. You dip the brush in pink for the ears and try not to watch the drip running down the brickwork.

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Mr Oakes wants no airbrush. The last tiger he had painted looked, he said, like a wallpaper sample, all soft gradients and sulking. So you work from the squared-up sketch and cut the face into planes: teal for the jaw where the shadow sits, orange across the cheeks, black slashes over the brow that you lay in with a rigger's brush until your wrist aches. The tiger is not looking at anyone. Its eyes fix on a point just above the cloakroom door, as if it has heard its name called.

By nine the hall is one single heat. The floor gives under two hundred pairs of shoes and the band launches into a quickstep that rattles the fire buckets. You stand by the cloakroom hatch with a cup of stewed tea while the poster throws its angled colour down over the crowd. Vera from the chip shop dances with the bass player in a slow circle, and each time they turn, the tiger seems to swing its gaze after them, pink ears bright and unbothered.

At closing, Mr Oakes kills the lights and the tiger is the last thing left, lit by the green exit sign. You climb back up with a damp rag and find one black stripe has bled down into the teal. You think about scraping it clean. Instead you leave it, a little wrong and a little bold, the way the trumpet cracks on the high note and the whole room cheers anyway.