Black and grey tiger head with clouds tattooed on the back of a hand, held with another hand against dark clothing.

Tiger and clouds on the back of a hand

Japanese · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A black and grey tiger head with bared teeth and swirling clouds covers the back of a hand and extends toward the wrist. Bold outlines and grey shading define the fur, face and cloud shapes. The tattooed hand is clasped with a second hand, set against navy trousers, a navy skirt and a light knit sweater.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the Corran pass for three days, and Maren had run out of patience long before she ran out of bread. When the yard bolt scraped back at dusk she expected the carter. Instead a man stood in the doorway holding a lantern by its iron handle, and on the back of the hand that gripped it something grey and snarling looked up at her: a tiger with its jaws open, its mane curling off into cloud.

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He said his name was Teodor and that he had come down from the high meadows, where the cloud sat on the ground all winter. The old women in the valley told a story about a tiger that lived in the clouds and came down only when someone was lost on the mountain. Maren had heard it at her grandmother's table and never believed a word. She poured him brandy anyway. He laid his hand flat on the bar, and she saw the cloud-work run up beneath his cuff like smoke under a door.

Through the night the wind worked at the shutters. The salt merchant in room four complained about the cold, then the draught, then the snow itself. Teodor sat by the fire and said little, only that the tiger never liked to be kept waiting, and that a lost thing was easier to find when someone else stopped looking for it. Maren did not ask what he meant. She fed the fire and listened to the wind drop.

At first light the sky was clean and the pass was open. Tracks led up the white slope toward the meadows, his boot prints and beside them a second set, wide and soft, with five toes and a claw at each. Maren stood in the yard and watched the lantern shrink to a point on the mountain. Then she went back inside and, for the first time in her life, left the bolt off.

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