Close view of a man's neck with black and grey script and a winged design, and his hands with traditional-style tattoos including a red-ribbed tiger and a rose, and knuckle lettering.

Neck script, wing and hand tattoos

Traditional · Neck · Mixed · Photo

The photo crops the subject at the lips and jaw, showing a neck tattoo of looping script above a large wing with shaded feathers. Both hands are tattooed, with knuckle lettering and a rose and a tiger-like animal in bold outlines and solid shading. Mostly grey and black ink, with red accents on the hands, set against a camouflage jacket.

Traditional Neck Hand Script Wing Rose Tiger Lettering

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Walsall had ever seen a tiger drawn on a wing, so when Terry Lusk came into the shop with a folded sketch of a rose, a tiger and a loop of looping script, my father said it could not be done. Terry laid the paper on the counter anyway, beside a tray of signet rings and the brass bell that had announced every customer for thirty years. He wanted the wing and the script done on his neck, the tiger across his knuckles, and a rose where his heart would go if he had been born with one in the right place.

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"And who's paying for all that?" my father asked, pencil already hovering over the ledger. Terry said he would pay in labour. The sign above the door had been flickering P-A-W-N for a year, and nobody on the high street had the nerve to climb the ladder. Terry climbed it that Saturday with a spanner in his teeth and a tin of Brasso in his pocket, and when he came down the light held steady for the first time since spring.

He came back every Saturday after that. The bell rang, the kettle went on, and the ledger filled with small sums that never quite balanced. By October the wing was finished on his skin, my father said, though he would not say where he had seen it, and the tiger had begun to grow across Terry's fingers like a cat slipping over a wall.

The last Saturday, Terry did not come. My father sat under the flickering sign with the ledger open and the bell silent. At closing he switched the sign off, then on again, and for one moment before the old bulb gave out, the letters spelt out T-I-G-E-R in the dark street.