Hand-drawn tiger design looking back over its shoulder, with black ink on the head and shoulders shading to purple, blue and green on the body, legs and tail.

Tiger design with black, purple, blue and green stripes

Mixed · Flash

A stylised tiger is shown in profile, looking back over its shoulder with its body arched and one foreleg raised. The head and upper body are drawn in bold black linework with striped markings, while the lower body, legs and tail move through purple, blue and green ink. The design sits centred on a plain off-white background.

Tiger Stripe Tail Paw

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger had been walking the ridge since the first frost, and by the time the wind turned the colour of tin, it had stopped looking back at the valley where the bells of Hollin Ferry rang for the dead. Corra Vell, the ferryman's daughter, followed its tracks through the bracken with a lantern she did not light, because the tiger had told her in a dream that light would make it shy.

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She found it at the edge of the old quarry, standing on three legs with one forepaw lifted as though it had forgotten where to set it down. Its black stripes ran dark as river stones across the shoulders, but where the coat should have turned to rust and gold, the ink had bled into violet, then into a blue like deep water, and finally into green at the tip of the tail, which swept behind it like a question nobody had asked yet.

"You are colder than you were," Corra said. The tiger turned its head over its shoulder and looked at her the way the ferry's old rope looked at a snagged hook, patient and unwilling to give.

She took the lantern and held it up. The light did not make the tiger shy. It showed the colours sliding back along its flank, purple retreating up the spine, blue pooling at the hip, green curling back into the tail until the whole animal was only black again, and then only a shadow on the stones.

She went home by the river road with an empty lantern, and in the morning the ferry bell rang once for no one, and Corra did not go to the quarry again.