Black and grey tattoo of a striding tiger with a curling tail and water splashes, across the left ribs of a bare torso.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Striding tiger on the ribs

Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A tiger strides diagonally down the side of the torso, head low and facing the viewer, with its tail curling up toward the shoulder. The tiger is drawn with bold, loose black linework and soft grey shading for the stripes and fur, and is surrounded by fine splashes and swirls that suggest water. The image is in black and grey against a dark background, with the composition following the curve of the ribs.

Ribs Tiger Stripe Tail Water Splash Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger came off the mainland ferry at Skerrie Sound the summer my brother stopped answering letters. Nobody on Inchmarrow had seen one before, and nobody believed Mrs Gall when she swore it had swum the channel, its tail lashing spray over the rail like a wet rope.

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My father kept the lamp at the north point. He said a striped thing in the water was a bad omen for a lighthouse keeper, since everything that wanted to drown came to the light first. I went down with a bucket of herring and found it on the shingle below the tower, head low, shoulders black with seawater. It looked at me the way the gulls look when you have brought nothing, so I sat on a rock and waited for it to decide what I was.

It did not eat me. It walked the tideline all that week, leaving prints the sea filled in behind it. Each dusk it stood in the shallows and shook itself until the water flew up in pale arcs that caught the last of the light. Father stopped scolding me for going down. By the second Sunday he was leaving the gate open.

The morning the post boat came for my brother's things, the tiger was gone. In the wet sand where it had lain was one long curl of foam, drawing back up toward the cliff path like a tail being lifted. I took the letter I had carried in my coat for a month and dropped it into the tide, and watched it go the way the tiger had, without looking back to see who would find it.