Black and grey realism tattoo of a tiger's face with roses on an upper arm, with a small butterfly above near the shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Realistic tiger and roses on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large tiger face looks forward with detailed fur, whiskers and striped markings, rendered in fine shading. Two roses sit below the tiger, with soft grey shading and sharp highlights on their petals. A small butterfly is tattooed near the top of the frame, close to the shoulder. The tattoo is in black and grey ink against a light blue sleeveless top.

Realism Upper arm Shoulder Tiger Rose Butterfly

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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

Sit closer, the lot of you, because the wind up here takes the middle of a story and leaves you the ends. So the tiger came down the pass the week the snow went off the rocks, and it came for the roses, not the goats, whatever the herdsmen tell you in the valley.

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Hamid's daughter kept the rose terrace below the Kesh gate. Every morning she cut three blooms and set them on the wall for the travellers, and every morning the striped one watched her from the scrub with eyes the colour of wet slate. She never ran. My grandmother said that was the first wrong thing she did, and the second was talking to it. She told it the roses were late this year because the frost had been unkind, and the tiger, which had no manners, yawned at her and lay down in the dust like a grey dog.

Nobody believes the rest, so I will tell it plainly. A monarch butterfly had blown over the pass with a broken wing, and it settled on the girl's shoulder while she argued with the cat. The tiger stood up. It walked to the wall, took the three roses one at a time in its mouth and set them down in a row at the girl's feet, petals open, exactly as she had set them out for everyone else. Then it went back up into the rocks, and the butterfly flew after it, and the roses did not wilt for a month.

So when you go over the pass and see a stone tiger with rosebuds at its paws, do not ask me who carved it. Leave a bloom on the wall, and mind your manners. That is all the wisdom an old man has left, and the wind has already taken the rest.