Colour tattoo of a roaring orange and black striped tiger with a small red and orange bird beside it, on the side of a torso below a black top.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger and small bird on the side ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A roaring tiger with orange fur and black stripes curls across the side of the torso, with its mouth open and tail raised. A small red and orange bird sits to its left. The tiger has bold outlines and solid colour fills, with some fine fur detail along its back, and the design sits against bare skin beneath a black top.

Ribs Tiger Bird

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The canary was already silent when the cage came up the shaft, so nobody in Tredegar Row said much when my father brought the tiger home. It had come off the back of a fairground lorry that broke down at the pit gates, a painted thing on canvas, orange as a lamp and striped in soot-black. He bought it from the showman for two shillings and a promise to fetch the lorry's wheel back by Sunday.

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Mam hung it over the range to keep the damp off, and by February it had gone the colour of weak tea. The bird was the part that made her cry. It was a red-breasted finch no bigger than my thumb, painted on the same cloth and perched on the tiger's shoulder as though it had asked for a lift. Dad said the tiger would roar at men who came in late for the tally. I never heard it roar, but I watched the cloth stir in the draught from the door each time someone came in from the drift with coal in the creases of his face.

When the roof came down at the Nine Foot in April, the house went quiet in a way I still cannot describe properly. The night the rescue men were fetched up, the cloth lifted in a gust from the door, and the little finch seemed to lean towards the doorway. Mam said it was the first thing in weeks that had looked like it knew which way was out.

Dad took the tiger down, folded it along its old creases, and carried it to the miners' hall the next morning. It hangs there still, above the tally board, and the men who come in late say it glares at them like it means to take the hide off their backs.