Black and grey Japanese-style tattoo of a roaring tiger with clouds and flowers across a person's chest and shoulder.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Roaring tiger tattoo on chest and shoulder

Japanese · Chest · Black and grey · Photo

A tiger with bared teeth and a snarling expression dominates the chest, with its head angled towards the upper right. Clouds, swirling smoke and blossoms fill the shoulder area, and faint stencil linework is visible on the upper arm. The tattoo uses dense black shading and grey wash with bold outlines and no colour.

Japanese Chest Shoulder Upper arm Tiger Cloud Smoke Flower Blossom

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the tiger in the plum rows on the last Sunday of August, when the fruit has begun to split on the branches and the wasps are drunk on it. It lies in the shade of the old Victoria tree as if it has been sent to inspect the crop. Smoke, or something like it, curls off its flank and drifts up into the branches, where a few late blossoms still hang white among the leaves, which is wrong for the season and which you decide not to mention.

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Your father always said the orchard had been planted by a man who came back from the war with a bag of stones and a grudge against the weather. He grew the trees and the tiger, he said, in equal measure, and neither was to be trusted. You have a ladder, a bucket and a pair of secateurs. You have a dog that has already gone under the fence and will not be coming back.

The tiger lifts its head. Its teeth are the grey of old piano keys, and its mouth opens in a yawn that becomes a roar so loud the plums drop around you like hail. You do not run. You set the bucket down, pick up the fallen fruit one by one and lay each on the ladder rung, the way your mother taught you when the wasps were bad. The tiger watches. Then it rises, pads past you along the row and stops at the gate, where the cloud-shaped smoke thickens and sets like wet ink on the hinge.

By dusk the gate is shut and the blossoms are gone. The next morning you find one white petal stuck to the bucket handle, and when you pick it up it is warm, as if someone has only just let it go.