Black leopard print tattoo of rosette spots covering the shoulder and upper arm, with a knitted cardigan visible beside it.

Leopard print tattoo on a shoulder

Shoulder · Black and grey · Photo

A close photograph of a leopard print pattern tattooed across the shoulder and upper arm. The rosettes are solid black with soft grey shading, drawn as irregular clusters of open and filled spots. The skin is a warm tone against a plain textured wall, and a loose knitted cardigan and long dark hair frame the tattoo.

Shoulder Upper arm Leopard print Animal print Spots Rosette

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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

Mags Heddle had been sent up the hill to the ruined keep with a basket of mending and a warning from her mother not to touch anything that had belonged to the Lady Ysolde. The keep had been roofless for two hundred years, but the solar still had a hearth and a chest, and the chest held a leopard skin folded like a letter. Nobody in the village had ever seen a leopard. Mags had only seen the dark spots on the pelt and thought they looked like something a child might scatter with a thumb.

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She spread the skin across the flagstones and counted. There were forty-one rosettes on the shoulder alone, some open like broken rings, some filled solid as coal dropped on snow. Each cluster leaned the way a crowd leans when it is trying to see past a cart. She tried to copy one onto a scrap of linen with charcoal, and her mark came out round and tidy and wrong. The spots did not sit on the cloth. They held on, the way a sleeve holds an arm.

By dusk she had stopped copying and was simply kneeling there, pressing her thumb into the charcoal dust and dotting it along the hem of her own sleeve, one mark, then a gap, then another. Footsteps came up the stair. Mags heard the basket set down and the chest lid creak.

"You've been at the cat," her mother said.

"It was looking at me," said Mags.

Her mother studied the sleeve, and for once did not scold. "Your great-aunt wore spots like that. She said the cat gave her the marks in exchange for the keep's last key, and that she never once went hungry after." Mags rolled the sleeve down over the smudges and felt, for the first time, that the spots were hers to keep.