Neo-traditional leopard head with an orange gem on its brow, framed by red flowers, tattooed on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Leopard head with red flowers on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A leopard's head faces the viewer, with an orange gem set on its brow and pale dotted ornamentation around it. Red five-petalled flowers and buds wrap around the head and trail down the lower edge of the design. Bold dark outlines and grey and brown shading give the fur depth, while the red and orange ink stand out against the skin.

Neo-trad Botanical Upper arm Leopard Big cat Flower Gem Bud

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The leopard had come aboard at Hythe Lock with a crate of paraffin and no proper owner, and by the time Nell Tambling found it curled on the coal hatch, the sun was just clearing the poplars. It lay with its head on a folded sack, as easy as a dog, a copper-coloured stone the size of a hen's egg set in a brass cup on its brow. Pale dots ran across its face in neat rows, as if someone had sewn it there with seed pearls.

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Nell had three children asleep below and a barge called Patience that leaked at the stern. She did not send for the constable. She filled the tin bucket from the cut, set it down, and went back to scraping the tiller while the animal drank with its eyes half shut. Red roses had come out along the towpath overnight, loose and heavy, and their petals drifted down onto the water and caught on the cabin roof. The leopard watched them go by as if it had been waiting for them.

The circus man came walking up from the lock at noon, sunburnt and short of breath, asking after a cat called Sunday. Nell told him the cat had taken its own passage and he could whistle for the fare. He looked at the stone on its brow for a long moment, then at the tiller, then at her. 'That's paid for,' he said. 'Bought it off a Dutch sailor for the rest of the crate.' He turned on his heel and went back the way he had come, and he did not ask for it again.

At the next lock the leopard stepped off the gunwale without a sound and walked into the hedge, the gem bobbing above the leaves like a lamp someone had forgotten to put out. Nell wiped her hands on her apron. Patience took the current again, and the petals kept coming down behind them on the wake, red as sealing wax, all the way to the sluice.