Black and grey geometric tiger tattoo wrapping around an upper arm and shoulder, with outlined stripes and small star marks.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric tiger on an upper arm

Blackwork · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A stylised tiger with a geometric, outlined design covers the upper arm and shoulder, with its head near the elbow and its body running up towards the shoulder. The linework is bold and mostly solid black, with angular diamond-shaped markings and hatched areas across the body, and small star shapes scattered around the design. The tattoo is entirely black ink on a plain background, with the arm filling most of the frame.

Blackwork Geometric Upper arm Shoulder Tiger Star Geometric pattern Diamond Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the peat is only honest for the first hour. You want the tiger, do you? Everyone wants the tiger. The one who came off the salt boat at Kelsa had her stripes laid on in hard black lines, like the edges of folded sails, and diamonds of shadow down her spine so the goats never saw her coming up the north slope.

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Old Mairin kept those goats. Each dusk she counted them against the stars, which hung very low over Kelsa in those years, near enough to snag on the masts. Every goat the tiger took, Mairin lost a star from her count, so she began scratching little four-pointed marks on the standing stone by the sheepfold, one for each thing she could not keep. The tiger came down to read them. She sat by the stone every night until grey light, studying the marks the way a magistrate studies a bad debt.

Here is the turn, so mind it. Mairin never went up the hill with a knife. She went up with a pail of ash and a clean rag, rubbed the marks out, and then sat down beside the great cat and asked her, plainly, what she wanted. The tiger said nothing, being a tiger, but she lay down with her head near Mairin's knee and went quiet, and the goats grazed on through the night unbothered.

They say the stars went up after that and stayed put. If you go to Kelsa and stand on the north slope on a clear night, you will find them scattered over the tiger's shoulder, a few on her ribs and one caught in the stripes by her ear, still being counted. Mairin's marks are gone. The tiger kept the stars.