Close crop of a woman in a patterned bralette showing a black panther and red rose traditional tattoo across her chest and upper arm, with an eye design on her forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Panther and rose tattoos on chest and arm

Traditional · Chest · Mixed · Photo

The photograph is cropped to the torso and arms, with the face not shown. A large black panther with bold outlines and solid black shading wraps across the chest, with a red and green rose beneath it. A further eye design with bold outlines sits on the forearm, and the tattoos are mostly black and grey with touches of red and green.

Traditional Chest Upper arm Forearm Panther Rose Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit yourself down on the step and mind the lift, it sticks between the ninth and the tenth and nobody has come to fix it since the spring. Haldane House has had a cat up its stairwell since before any of you were born, a black one, long as a man's arm, with a mouth full of teeth nobody could explain. Old Mrs Okafor on the fourth floor swore it was no cat at all but a panther that had walked out of the zoo the summer the rose bed went red.

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Every night it came up the back stairs, slow, leaving no marks in the dust. It wanted nothing but the top landing, where the window looks out over the railway. There a woman called Iris Dunmore kept a window box, and in it a single red rose with leaves gone blue at the edges from the diesel. Iris talked to that rose like a sister. The panther would lie along the sill and watch her water it, and she would watch the panther watch her, and neither of them asked the other for anything.

Then the council sent men with a wrecking ball for the estate, and Iris had a week. On the last night she set the rose on the landing, and the panther came up the stairs and did not lie down. It stood with its eyes open, the way they go in old photographs, and looked at the rose a long time. Then it turned and walked down, and the next morning the window box was empty and a red petal lay on every step all the way to the bottom.

The rose went with Iris to a flat in Margate, I'm told. The panther went wherever panthers go. And if you're asking where the eye came from, that's a story for another night, because the eye has been keeping watch on these stairs the whole time and it still is. Now the lift's working, so up you get.