Black and grey pencil sketch of a tiger stalking downward with its tail curling above it, drawn as a tattoo design on a plain pale background.

Pencil sketch of a tiger with curling tail

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A vertical pencil drawing of a tiger, with its head at the bottom and its body and paws stretched down the frame. The long tail curls into a spiral at the top, and the stripes are rendered with bold, flowing outlines and light graphite shading. The drawing is in black and grey on a plain pale background with no other elements.

Japanese Tiger Big cat Tail Sketch

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The last tiger on Halden Ring was asleep in the cargo lift when we found her, coiled around the maintenance cable as if someone had poured her there and let her set. Nobody had fed her in eleven years. Her ribs showed beneath stripes the colour of old solder under the work lights, and her tail had wound itself round the cable so many times that Ines had to cut the spiral with a hacksaw before the doors would close.

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We called the ring a garden because the first charter had promised one. Forty hectares of terraced rice turning slowly in the spin, and a sky of painted glass that the brochures swore was real sunlight. By the time we came aboard the glass had clouded and the terraces had gone to seed. Ines wanted to sell the tiger to a menagerie on Ceres. I wanted to take her down the spine to the lower decks, where the air still smelt of rain, and let her go in the old apple orchard.

She did not run. She stood in the dark between the rows and looked back up the spine at us, the way a tiger looks at something it has decided not to bother with yet. Then she lay down in the leaf litter and rolled, slow and heavy, until the grey dust of the ring came off her flanks in clouds.

Ine came back up the spine without speaking. Two days later she unlocked the lift herself and went down alone with a sack of dried fish. Some mornings now I hear the orchard gate creak and know the tail has come round the corner first, a slow loop of striped rope trailing the dust of the ring behind it.