Black and grey snarling tiger with pink blossoms and green leaves in a Japanese style, covering a forearm.

Tiger and blossom on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

A snarling tiger with open jaws and bared teeth fills the centre of the forearm, its head and claws rendered in black and grey with soft shading. Pink five-petalled blossoms with yellow centres and green leaves wrap around the tiger from the top and right edges. The background is dark, with pale skin tones and light grey wash behind the animal, giving a mostly monochrome image with colour concentrated in the flowers.

Japanese Forearm Tiger Blossom Flower Leaves Claw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Hush now, and pass the bowl along, because the cold has got into my knees and I am not going to tell this twice. The tiger came down from the ridge in the month the plum trees gave up their petals, when the brothers of Saint Orla's were still arguing about who had left the gate unbarred. Brother Cuthbert swore it was the wind. The wind does not have teeth.

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Nobody saw it arrive. They only saw the cherry boughs by the cistern shaking, petals coming down in a slow pink rain, and then a sound like a sack being dragged across flagstones. The old abbot, Ferrand, went out with a lamp and a copper pan, which tells you everything about his good sense. He came back with the lamp still lit and the pan under his arm. He would not say much, except that the beast had its jaws open and was roaring at the moon, and that it had stopped first to look at the blossoms.

That was the strangest part. A tiger that has come for a monastery's goats does not pause to admire flowers. So the brothers sat up through the night and watched, and what they saw was the beast circling the cistern, lying down among the fallen petals, and never once touching the goats in the pen. By morning it was gone. The goats had their ears back and their tails in the air, and the cherry boughs were bare as bones.

Ferrand kept that copper pan on his shelf until the day he died. Every spring after, the pink petals came down on its dented lid, and nobody ever dared to sweep them off.