Neo-trad style tattoo design drawn on paper, showing a roaring tiger above a coiled snake with leaves and a lotus-like flower in red and grey shading.

Roaring tiger and snake design sketch

Neo-trad · Mixed · Flash

A drawn tattoo design on paper showing a snarling tiger with its mouth wide open, above a snake with its head lowered toward the bottom of the composition. Leaves, a pale circle and a lotus-like flower frame the figures. Bold black outlines are combined with grey pencil shading and warm red-orange wash, with loose sketch lines still visible.

Neo-trad Tiger Snake Lotus Leaves Flower Circle

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hold the peel steady, love, and don't go looking at the window yet. The sun keeps to the bakers' clock, not the church one. Now, in the bakehouse on Saltergate there was a tiger who came in through the yard gate every night, roaring at the flour sacks as if they owed him money, and a snake who lay coiled under the proving tins waiting for him to wear himself out.

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Nobody saw them but the old baker, Mr Tobias Fenn, who kept his ovens hot and his mouth shut. The tiger said the dark needed telling off, or it would never shift. The snake said the sun came for the bread whether anybody roared or not. They argued until the oven's mouth went red and the hours stretched thin as dough.

One January morning the tiger roared so hard the lamp blew out. The bakehouse went black as a cellar. The snake slid off the tins, found the cold brick of the oven with its belly, and wrapped itself round it, coil over coil, until the stone was warm enough to wake the yeast. Mr Fenn felt his way in at five, laid his palm on the brick, and swore it had never been so hot.

When the first loaves came out, the window was pale as a dinner plate, and the sun sat on the sill like a bun left to cool. The tiger lay asleep across the flour sacks, snoring. The snake had a dusting of white on its back, and it said nothing about that. Now pass me the knife, and mind your fingers.