Full-colour Japanese style flash drawing of a snarling tiger among bamboo leaves and clouds, with a small frog below, shown without a body placement.

Tiger, bamboo and frog flash design

Japanese · Colour · Flash

A snarling orange and black tiger, shown from the side and looking back over its shoulder, fills the centre of the sheet. Green bamboo leaves and stalks, stylised grey and white clouds, and red berries surround it, with a small green frog holding a black curling tail-like line in the lower left. Bold black outlines, solid colour fills and grey shading on the background give the design a traditional Japanese feel.

Japanese Tiger Cloud Frog Leaves Berry

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger came aboard at Yokohama, painted on silk by a man who owed my father money, and nobody on the Mary Ostrander wanted it hung above the galley stove. Cook said it watched him over its shoulder while he peeled potatoes. I said that is what tigers do when they have heard something behind them. We were eleven weeks out with a hold full of tea and bamboo poles, and the sea had been the colour of wet slate for most of them.

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The frog belonged to Pim, the second mate, a soft-spoken man from Penzance who kept it in a jam jar on the chart-room sill and fed it flies caught in the lamp glass. On the thirtieth night it stopped eating. It sat with its throat pulsing and stared at the scroll Pim had nailed beside the compass. Pim said frogs can smell weather. We all looked up at a sky as clean as a plate, then out at the sea, which had begun to heave in long grey ridges under a bank of cloud the colour of a bruise.

The squall hit at four bells in the middle watch. The bamboo poles lashed along the deck bent like fishing rods and held, and the cloud curls on the scroll seemed the only calm thing left in the wheelhouse. When I went down to fetch the jar I found the lid off and the frog gone. Pim was on his knees by the scroll, laughing and shouting at once. The little animal had climbed the nail, hooked itself under the lower edge of the silk, and sat there tucked against the tiger's paw as if it had paid for the room.

We made Plymouth nine days later with the sails in rags. Pim said the frog had only wanted a dry place to wait out the wind. I have the scroll now, rolled in my sea chest with a red berry pressed flat between its pages. I still check the sky before I speak about the weather, and I still look over my shoulder when the cook starts singing in the galley.