Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snarling black panther head

Traditional · Mixed · Flash

A black panther head faces right with its mouth wide open, showing white fangs and a red tongue. The bold black shapes have white outlines, and small areas of yellow, red and white mark the eye, the inside of the mouth and the whiskers. The design is shown flat against a plain white background, centred in the frame.

Traditional Panther Big cat Snarl Animal head Fangs

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody in Santa Rosa Flats could say when the black cat first came down out of the arroyo. Old Dell Mackey swore it had been lying by the water tank at mile forty before the rail line was laid, its yellow eye open while the rest of the desert slept. Travellers said it snarled at them, and it did, with the mouth wide and the red tongue curled back, but Dell said the snarl was never meant for people. It was for the sun, which came up white over the mesa every morning and wanted every living thing to lie down and quit.

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The year the tank cracked, a boy named Tomas Ruiz came up the road on a bicycle with one canteen and a sack of pinto beans. The tank was dry, the pipe rusted through, and the heat had already got into his head. He sat down in the strip of shade beside the concrete to wait for a lorry that might not come. The panther padded out from the scrub and stood over him, fangs bared, and he decided that was the end of it. Instead it lowered its head, turned, and walked back toward the arroyo, stopping every few steps to look round until he got up and followed.

In the dry bed, under an overhang of red rock, a seep kept a pool no wider than a cart. The panther drank first, then stepped aside and sat with its tail wrapped over its paws. Tomas filled the canteen, drank, filled it again, and when he looked up the cat was gone, leaving only a line of prints in the mud.

He came back every summer with a bucket, a wrench and a length of new pipe. Dell said he had never known anyone to bring water to a cat. On the morning the tank finally held, the black shape was stretched out on the warm concrete with its eye half shut, and when the sun came up white over the mesa it opened its jaws at it, red tongue and all, and the sun had to go round.