Colour neo-traditional tattoo of a roaring tiger and a green snake with a red disc and flames, on the upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roaring tiger and snake on upper arm

Neo-trad · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A snarling tiger with its mouth wide open fills the upper part of the design, with a green-eyed snake coiling beneath it and biting near a red disc. Bold black outlines define the fur, scales and leaves, with heavy solid shading. Strong oranges, reds and greens dominate against dark ink, and the design is arranged around the curve of the upper arm.

Neo-trad Traditional Upper arm Tiger Snake Sun Flame Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer and mind the lamp, it spits when the wind goes south. My grandfather kept this light before the war, and he told me about the summer the tiger came ashore at Gull Rock. It arrived in a crate from a Bombay steamer, the boards split on the slipway, and out it stepped into the spray, roaring at the gulls as if the whole coast had insulted it.

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The keeper then was Tomas Penhallow, a quiet man who kept a grass snake in a jar on the windowsill. He fed it a mouse on Sundays and talked to it about the tides. The tiger could smell the snake from the cliff path. Every night it lay at the foot of the tower and roared until the glass rattled, and every night Tomas climbed down with a bucket of fish to shut it up.

Then came the August gale. The wick caught, the flames climbed the iron stairs, and the whole lamp room glowed orange. Tomas got the snake out of its jar and ran for the cliff, the tiger bounding after him through the smoke. At the top of the path the snake slid from his hand and reared up, green eyes blazing, straight at the great beast. The tiger stopped dead. Out on the water the sun was setting, a red disc sinking, and the snake lunged at its edge as if to bite it out of the sky.

Nobody told me how they settled it. Tomas said they simply sat down together on the rocks and watched the fire burn out. By morning the lamp was dark, the tiger was asleep across the step, and the snake was coiled in his hat. That night he lit the lamp again, and I like to think the tiger still keeps watch from the foot of the tower, roaring at anything that dares come near the light.