Traditional style tiger tattoo across a man's back, with bold black linework, grey shading and red accents around the mouth and paw.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger across a back

Traditional · Back · Mixed · Photo

A large tiger head roaring is the main subject, with its striped body running down the left side of the back and a paw at the lower left. The design uses heavy black outlines, angular stripes and grey shading to give the fur depth, with small areas of red accent near the mouth and paw. The tattoo fills most of the frame, and other tattoos are partly visible at the right edge of the image.

Traditional Back Tiger Stripe Paw Roar

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Gaius had been told the beast from the eastern caravans would be quiet after the long crossing, and for three days it was. It lay in the straw of the shed behind the Ostia warehouses with its striped flanks rising and falling, and the dock boys came to look at it through the gaps in the planks and went away again without throwing anything.

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On the fourth morning the ship's clerk came with the bill for the fodder, and the tiger woke at the sound of his sandals on the gravel. It rose all at once, the way a hinge gives, and its head came up above the half door. Gaius saw the red inside its jaws, the bright wet colour of the pomegranate the Syrian sailors had sold him, and he understood that the roar had been waiting in it the whole crossing.

The clerk dropped the tablet. Gaius did not move. He had handled dogs and goats and once a bear, and he knew that a man who runs is only a second meal. So he sat down on the upturned crate, slid the bolt, let the door swing open a hand's width, and began to sing the sailors' song about the wind off Cyprus, badly, the way his mother used to sing it while she mended nets.

The tiger stopped at the threshold. Its paw, broad as a loaf, lifted and hung in the air. Then it padded past him into the street, and the whole of Ostia stood aside to let it go down to the water, where it lay on the stones and watched the boats come in as if it had always owned the harbour. Gaius kept the crate. The clerk kept the bill, and nobody ever paid for the fodder.