Realism tattoo of a grey tiger head with blue eyes beside two red roses with green leaves, on the upper back near the shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger and red roses on upper back

Realism · Back · Mixed · Photo

A grey-and-black tiger head with pale blue eyes faces left, with whiskers and striped fur shaded in soft gradients. Two large red roses with green leaves sit to its right, filling the lower and right side of the design. The tattoo is coloured mixed, with detailed shading on the tiger and smooth, saturated reds on the flowers against a pale skin background.

Realism Back Tiger Rose Leaves

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger came to Sallow Cross Fair in a crate with someone else's name painted on the side, and by the second week Mrs Pell had given him the bottom field and the best of her roses to keep him company. Nobody on the green had asked her to. She said he looked lonely, the way his blue eyes kept turning towards the hedge, and that a lonely animal was a dangerous one, and she would rather he was lonely among flowers.

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I was ten that summer and paid to fetch her milk, so I saw the arrangement grow. Each morning there were petals on his paws where he had lain among the stems, and each evening he would lift his great striped head when the church bell struck, as if he were counting. Mrs Pell talked to him in a low voice I was not meant to hear. She told him about her late husband's hands, about the frost that year that killed the cuttings, about the postman who never once looked at her. He listened. The roses went on blooming, dark red and heavy, as if they had been waiting for an audience.

In August the showman came back with a paper that said he was owed a tiger. He was a thin man in a waistcoat that had been good once. Mrs Pell stood at her gate with her arms folded and said nothing for a long time. Then she walked to the field, knelt, and whispered something to the animal that made him rise slowly and walk past the roses without a backward glance.

The crate went rattling down the lane in the late light. Only when it had gone did I see that Mrs Pell had pushed one red bloom between the bars, pinned there with a hairpin, so that the whole way to the county road a single flower nodded in the wind above the dust. She never told me why, and I never asked her.