Realistic blue-grey design of an elephant, tiger, panda and rhinoceros heads stacked beneath a full moon, with black ink drips down the lower edge.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Stacked animal heads with a full moon

Realism · Colour · Flash

The design shows an elephant, a roaring tiger, a panda, a rhinoceros and a white tiger with a full moon above them, layered into a single stacked composition. The animals are rendered with soft watercolour-style shading and fine detail in the fur, skin and eyes. The palette is blue-grey with black ink drips running down the bottom of the image on a white background.

Realism Elephant Tiger Panda Moon Animal Ink drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The abbot wanted the animals painted before the winter snow closed the pass, and he wanted them stacked one above another like pilgrims on a stair. Brother Anselm mixed the blue from ground lapis that cost more than the roof timbers, and he grumbled at every brushful. I did not argue with him. I was the one who had asked for the ink drips, and I knew the abbot would hear about it.

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The elephant came first, because the old cellarer had once kept one in a stable at the bottom of the valley and swore it remembered faces. I gave it a trunk raised as if to greet the moon. Then the tiger, which I painted roaring because the travellers who came up from Sankt Veit said a roaring tiger frightens off the cold. The panda was Anselm's idea. He said a creature so plainly contented should sit beneath the others and keep them from quarrelling.

On the last night the ink refused to dry. I had thinned it with rainwater from the cistern, and it ran down the wall in black threads, over the rhinoceros's horn and under the white tiger's chin. Anselm wanted to scrape it away before the abbot came. I held his wrist. The drips looked like the shadows the moon leaves behind on the snow, and I had seen enough of those on the mountain to know they were true.

In the morning the abbot stood before the wall for a long time without speaking. Then he asked who had painted the moon so pale, and I said it was Anselm, who laughed and said it was the ink. The abbot did not ask again. He ordered the wall left as it was, the pass froze that week, and nobody climbed up to see the animals until spring, by which time the ink had dried into the plaster and could not be scraped away.