Realism tattoo of a tiger's face with bright blue eyes and black and grey fur markings, across the inner forearm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger eyes tattoo on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

The tattoo shows a close-up of a tiger's face, with its eyes and the dark stripes across its brow and cheeks dominating the forearm. The fur is rendered with soft, layered black and grey shading and fine feathered strokes, giving a realistic texture. The eyes are the only colour, a pale blue with light highlights, which draws the eye against the otherwise monochrome skin and ink.

Realism Forearm Tiger Eye Big cat Stripe Animal portrait Fur

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The windfalls had split open in the heat, and the wasps had found them before we did. Dad sent me up the ladder for the high Victorias while the men from the fruit co-op argued over a crate, and that was when I turned round and found the tiger standing in the row between the trees, nose low, as if the plums had been laid out for him.

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Nobody in Ashcombe had seen the Harrow menagerie leave its field behind the chapel that morning, but everybody had heard about the old tiger, Sabre, whose teeth had gone and whose keeper had stopped coming round. I stayed on the top rung with my fingers locked in the bark. He did not look at me. His stripes ran down his face like dark bands across a late evening, and his eyes were a pale, watery blue, the blue of the cup my nan kept for best, the only clean colour in all that rust and black.

He lay down in the long grass under the Victorias, rolled a fallen plum under one paw and bit it open. Juice ran into his whiskers. Dad came back with the trailer, saw him, and stood very still with a pail in each hand. 'Well,' he said quietly, 'he's having the best of the crop.' I laughed, which was a mistake, because the tiger lifted his head and looked straight at me, and the look said he had been waiting a long time for someone to stop running.

Harrow's lorry came up the lane at dusk, its horn going like a wounded goose, and the keeper walked the tiger back with a bucket of offal and no stick at all. At the hedge gap the animal stopped and turned his head. I could see those eyes from the wall, two small blue lamps in the dusk. Then he was gone, the orchard smelt of plums and crushed grass, and I still had a windfall in my hand that I had forgotten to drop.