Striped tiger design in black ink

Blackwork · Black and grey · Flash

A tiger shown in side profile, facing right, with its head raised and its tail curling at the bottom of the image. The body is filled with bold, wavy black stripes separated by white gaps, and the head has simplified features and a small open mouth. The design is flat black on a plain white background with no shading or colour.

Blackwork Tiger Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, the lot of you, and mind the boy with the cough, he has the good end of the bench. The snow had shut the pass above Corrie Hollin that winter, and the brothers of Saint Wenna's were three days from the nearest bread. Brother Ostrin was the copyist then, a thin man with ink to the elbows, and he was the first to see the tiger, though it took him a week to admit it.

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It had come out of a spoiled page. He had been copying the founder's Psalter, and a drop of lampblack fell where the margin was still wet. Each morning the stripes on that drop had crept a little further from the centre, lapping over the vellum like a tide, until one dawn the page was bare and the animal stood in the frozen yard with its head raised, watching the gate as if someone had promised to come through it. Ostrin wept, then laughed, then fetched the abbot, who said nothing and fed it the last of the salt fish.

For a month it kept to the woodshed, and the brothers learnt its habits. It walked the wall at dusk, its tail lifting and falling, and it seemed to be counting something under its breath. Ostrin asked it once what it counted. It turned its head slowly and showed him its open mouth, but made no sound. He understood then that it was counting the lines he had not yet copied, because every stripe it wore was a sentence someone had begun and never finished.

When the pass cleared in spring the tiger was gone, and the page was whole again, with a new border of striped ink curling round the last line of the psalm. Ostrin kept that leaf under his pillow until he died. If you climb up to the library at Saint Wenna's you may still see it, and if you count the stripes about the tail you will find as many as there are years since the brothers last left the gate unbarred for a stranger. Now the fire is low. Off to bed, and mind the step.