Tiger eyes tattoo on the back

She came aboard at Calcutta in the summer of eighteen seventy-one, a female Bengal in a crate of teak so tight the carpenter swore she'd never stretch a leg in it. Captain Harrow had bought her out of a dead man's debts and meant to sell her to a menagerie in Liverpool, alive and unmarked. The boy who fed her was Tobias Feeney, eleven years old and too thin for the bell rope. Every night he pushed raw mutton through the slats, and every night two eyes rose out of the dark of the hold, green as bottle glass held up to a lamp.

Off the Cape the weather turned. A sea came over the rail and split the crate like a biscuit tin, and by morning the hold was black water and broken timber and nothing that moved. Harrow sent the men below with lanterns. Tobias went first because he knew where she liked to lie. He found her wedged behind the water casks, her flanks heaving, and she turned her head and looked at him with those eyes, and he understood she was no more afraid of the dark than he was.

She never touched him. She walked past the men on the ladder and up onto the wet deck, and she stood at the bow watching the grey swell as though counting it. When we made Liverpool a week late the crate was never found and nobody swore to seeing her leave. Only a line of large wet prints ran down the gangway, drying on the flagstones one by one, and Tobias kept a single orange hair in his cap for the rest of his life.