Two photos of a multicoloured leopard print tattoo with pink, teal, green and orange spots on the side of the body.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Multicolour leopard print on the side

Other · Colour · Photo

A leopard print pattern of irregular dark rosettes covers a long, curving area of skin, shown in two side-by-side photographs. Most spots are filled with solid colour in pink, orange, teal, green and purple, while the dark outlines are a dark green or black base. The bold, flat colour and clean edges are shown against pale skin, with a patterned waistband visible at the edge of the frame.

Other Leopard print Spots Animal print

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The leopard had stood outside the Sundown Motel since 1961, and by the time Dolores Yates hired me the rain had stripped it to grey fibreglass with a few sad black rosettes still clinging on. "Make it like the old photograph," she said, tapping the frame behind the till, where a faded car sat in a wash of mauve dust. I never did find out what happened to that car.

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I mixed the paints in the laundry room with a cheap kit from a hardware shop in Barstow: teal for the big spots at the shoulder, pink where the sun hit hardest, orange along the flanks. Dolores wanted green in the middle because her husband used to call it the colour of money he never had. Each rosette got an outline first, then the colour dragged in, and I waited for the heat to dry each one before moving on. Trucks hummed past all afternoon, and I numbered every spot on a notepad so I would not lose my place.

On the fourth day a boy from the petrol station cycled up the verge and asked whether the cat was real. I told him it was made of the same stuff as boats. He asked if it could run. Dolores laughed from the office doorway, then went quiet, and I understood she had been waiting years for someone to ask.

We finished at dusk. I painted the last purple spot on the tail, the one she had asked me to leave slightly crooked, and when the light went flat across the desert the leopard seemed to lift its head and look down the road, as if it had only just decided to stay. Dolores brought out two cold bottles and sat on the step beside me, and neither of us said a word about leaving.