Full back tattoo in Japanese style showing a roaring tiger, a coiled snake, flowers and wave motifs, in black and grey shading.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger and snake back piece

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A large back piece shows a snarling tiger leaping across the body with a coiled snake beside its head. Behind them sit flowers, cloud shapes and stylised waves, with bold black stripes and soft grey shading creating depth. The design fills the whole back and is framed by partly visible tattoos at the edges of the frame.

Japanese Back Tiger Snake Flower Cloud Wave

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger came up the stairwell of Harrow Court the winter the lift broke for good, and nobody on the fourteenth floor thought much of it at first. Mrs Okonedo swore she heard its feet on the concrete landings, soft as wet washing being dragged, and Mr Pryce from flat nine said it was only the boiler. But the cats went quiet and the pigeons stopped roosting on the ledges, and by February the lads who kept the bins had started walking in pairs.

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There was a snake living under the stairs by then, a grey thing that had come up through the drains after the flood. Old Dorothy Lusk said the two of them had been fighting over the rubbish chute since before she moved in. She said a tiger does not climb fourteen floors for nothing, and a snake does not leave a warm drain for nothing either. Nobody believed her until the night the lights went out across the whole block and the snake came curling up the banister, slow as a river, and the tiger rose out of the dark behind it with its jaws open and its stripes bright as lamp oil.

They fought on the landing between flats eleven and twelve. Dorothy said later that the waves came in under the doors like a tide, and that cloud gathered in the stairwell so thick you could not see your own hand. Neither beast won. The tiger got the snake by the neck, the snake wound itself round the tiger's foreleg, and they went on like that until the sun came up grey over the car park.

In the morning there were no tracks, only a long shining trail of scales along the railings and a single orange hair caught on a bolt. Dorothy swept it into a jam jar and kept it on her windowsill, facing the estate. Whenever the wind got up on the fourteenth floor, she said the tiger was still out there, keeping the snake honest.