Neo-traditional tattoo of a snarling hyena head with bared teeth and dripping blood, shaded in grey and brown with touches of red, on the side of a limb.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Snarling hyena head with blood on an arm

Neo-trad · Other · Mixed · Photo

A snarling hyena head is shown in profile, with a bristled mane along the back and a open mouth showing teeth, with red dripping from its jaw. The bold dark outlines are filled with smooth grey and brown shading, with blue-grey highlights on the mane and red for the blood. The design fills most of the frame against plain skin, with a few partial tattoos visible at the edges.

Neo-trad Other Head Mane Teeth Blood Snarl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The ship had been three weeks out of Bristol when the cook began to sing to the hyena, and nobody aboard could say where it had come from. It was a grey-brown thing with a mane like a wet broom, and it sat in the bow of the longboat as if it had paid for its passage. Old Hobb Tennant said it was a stowaway from the African coast, a creature that had crept aboard in a crate of ginger. The boy Cass said it had come up out of the hold with the rats, and the rats had all gone quiet since.

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No one would touch it. It ate what was given and never took more, and it watched the men with pale, sidelong eyes that did not blink in the spray. When the fever came through the forecastle in the fourth week, Hobb was the first to go down, and the hyena walked the length of the deck to lie across his bunk like a dog. The surgeon swore it was a bad omen. Cass swore it was keeping him warm. In the morning Hobb was sitting up, asking for tea, and the hyena had blood on its jaws that belonged to nobody's wound.

They made port in the autumn with eleven men fewer than they had sailed with. The hyena went ashore without a word and was never seen on the quay again. Cass kept the ginger crate, and it was years before he found a single hair caught in the slats, grey and coarse as a bristle brush, and he burned it in the stove without thinking why.