Colour tattoo of a tiger cub sitting in water with a small fish, with a butterfly above, on a person's upper back.

Tiger cub with butterfly on upper back

Neo-trad · Back · Colour · Photo

A tiger cub with blue eyes sits in shallow water, its front paws resting near a small striped fish, with a second fish below and a few bubbles rising beside it. A yellow and orange butterfly sits above the cub, and the cub is outlined in bold black lines with soft orange, yellow and brown shading. Bright colour dominates the tattoo against plain skin, with the subject centred on the upper back.

Neo-trad Back Tiger Butterfly Fish Water Bubble

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cub came up from the pit in a coal sack on the morning the whistle failed, and nobody in Hollin Bottom could say who had put it there. Mrs Vennor found it in the wash-house, blinking at her with eyes as blue as the lamp glass, and she fed it warm milk from a stone bottle until the men complained about the noise.

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The brook behind the colliery ran orange with iron in those years, and the cub would not stay out of it. Each evening it waded into the shallows below the spoil heap and sat with its paws in the cold water, batting at the little striped fish that darted between the stones. Old Tom Parr said the fish were the last trout that had lived there before the shaft was sunk, and that the cub was keeping them company. Nobody argued with Tom, because he had been down the pit forty years and had never once come up with the same face he went down with.

When the water rose that November and the lower galleries flooded, the men went down with ropes and found the workings full of black water and no sign of the cub. Mrs Vennor walked to the brook every night after that. On the seventh night a butterfly, yellow as a lamp flame, settled on her shawl and would not leave. When she looked down at the shallows, the cub was sitting there with two fish at its paws and a string of bubbles rising beside it, as calm as a cat by a kitchen range.

She said nothing to the men. The next morning the pit whistle blew clean for the first time in a month, and the fish in the brook had gone quiet and gold. Nobody saw the cub again. Some say it went back down to find the boys who had lost their way in the dark. Mrs Vennor only said it had gone where the water was clear enough to see its own stripes.