Colour realism tattoo of a tiger's head with pale blue eyes and whiskers, set against a purple wash and a blue flower on the calf.

Realistic tiger head with blue eyes on a calf

Realism · Calf · Colour · Photo

A tiger's head fills most of the frame, facing forward with pale blue eyes, dark stripes, and long whiskers. Soft airbrush-like shading gives the fur depth, and a purple wash sits behind the head. A blue and lilac flower with small droplet details curls across the lower left, and the design follows the curve of the limb.

Realism Calf Tiger Blue eye Whiskers Flower Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger comes ashore on Inish Mor the week after the cargo boat goes down on the Skerry, and nobody on the island will say where it came from. You are fourteen and you find it first, lying in the bracken above the slipway with its chin on its paws, wet as a drowned coat. Its eyes are the pale blue of the bay in the hour before rain, and they do not leave you when you back away.

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Your grandmother says a thing that comes out of the sea belongs to whoever feeds it, so you carry mackerel up the path in a bucket each evening and set it down at the edge of the heather. The tiger eats without hurry. Behind it the sky goes lilac and then violet over the headland, and you start to think of that colour as its colour. On the third night the stripes seem to thin into the dusk, and you cannot tell where the animal ends and the light begins.

On the fourth night the men come across from the mainland with lamps and a net, and your uncle stands between them and the bracken with his arms out. You don't hear what he says. You only see the tiger rise, slow and grey-gold, and turn its head towards you, the way it has every evening, as if to ask for the bucket. Then it steps down past the blue flowers that have grown up through the rocks, the tall ones with the dew still hanging off their petals, and it is gone into the water before anyone can shout.

In September the postman brings a parcel addressed to you with no return. Inside is a sea-smoothed stone with a thin blue scratch across one face, and a note in your uncle's hand that says only: it went north. You keep the stone on the windowsill, and in the mornings the light comes through it the colour of the bay before rain.