Snarling tiger with bamboo on forearm
Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo
A tiger with its mouth open in a snarl dominates the forearm, with bamboo leaves sweeping across the lower half and a grey cloud shape behind its head. Shading in orange, black and grey gives the fur and rocks at the base depth, with bold black outlines on the tiger. Vertical kanji characters run down the right side of the arm, and a red and yellow dragon is partly visible at the top edge.
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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction
The screen was half finished when the magistrate's clerk climbed the mountain path to ask why the tiger still had no eyes. You had left them blank because your master always painted the eyes himself, and he had died in the spring with the ink still in his grinding bowl. The ink you had was thinner than it should have been, grey where it ought to be black, so you thinned it again with rainwater from the cistern and kept the brush moving.
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Behind the temple the bamboo bent in a wind that came off the sea two valleys away. You had painted each leaf in three quick strokes, flicking upward the way he taught you, and above them a soft grey shelf of cloud that the clerk said looked like a bruise. He was not wrong. It was the colour the sky had gone on the evening your master stopped speaking to you.
On the last night you mixed amber for the eyes and sat with the brush above the paper until the lamp guttered. When you finally touched it down, the tiger's jaw seemed to lift, and you told yourself it was only the flame. In the morning the screen stood empty except for a line of wet paw prints leading down the temple steps toward the rocks. On the bottom step lay your master's old brush, dry, with one bristle missing.
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