Neo-traditional colour tattoo of a snarling leopard head with an orange eye, pink flowers and green leaves across the back of a hand.

Leopard head and pink flowers on the hand

Neo-trad · Hand · Colour · Photo

A snarling leopard head with bared yellow fangs and an orange eye fills the back of the hand, with spotted fur shaded in blue and grey. Pink flowers and green leaves frame the design, and a pink bud sits near the knuckles and fingers. Bold black outlines define the shapes, and the colours are saturated against a pale background.

Neo-trad Hand Leopard Big cat Fangs Flower Pink flower Leaves Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The leopard came off the lorry at ten past three, rolled in a tarpaulin that had once held compost, and the first thing I saw of it was one orange eye opening in the dark like a shop sign switching on. I was stacking pink peonies into buckets under the strip lights of the wholesale yard behind the ring road, and the driver was already backing away with both hands raised, saying it was not his fault, the man at Dock Four had sworn it was a sofa.

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It walked the length of the aisle without hurrying. Wet tarmac shone between the crates, and every few steps it stopped to lift its lip and show me the yellow fangs, the way my gran used to when someone brought in a bad batch of tulips. Nobody else was awake. The night porters had gone for their flask tea, and the radio on my stall was playing a song about a broken hitchhiker with the volume too high.

I should have rung someone. Instead I sat on an upturned crate and waited, because a leopard in a flower market is only ever looking for one thing, and it was not me. It went straight to the bucket of pink dahlias, nosed past three stems, and took one bud between its teeth as gently as a mother carrying a kitten. Then it padded back past me, shouldering through the green leaves, and vanished between the lorries.

The porters found the buckets knocked over at six. The sofa man never turned up. When I got home and unlocked my door, there was a single pink bud on the mat, still beaded with water, and beside it a trail of wet paw prints, each one a small dark rosette fading on the step.