Black and grey realism tattoo of a tiger's eyes and striped face within a feather, on the inner forearm.

Tiger eyes within a feather on a forearm

Realism · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A feather fills the frame, and its vanes are shaded with bold black stripes that match a tiger's coat. Two eyes and the muzzle of the big cat sit within the feather, with the central quill running across them. The shading is soft and detailed, with stippled texture on the cheek, and the image is taken straight on against a white paper towel background.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The rain had been falling on the market at Harrowgate since before dawn, and Mrs Okonkwo's stall was the only one with its awning still up. She sold quills to the stationers and loose feathers to the milliners, sorted into tins by colour and length. Tomas, who swept the gutters for the council, stopped to shelter under her edge and watched her pull a long grey-banded feather from a jar of water and shake it dry.

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"Nobody wants a plain feather in weather like this," she said. "They want one that remembers something." She held it up against the grey sky until the black bars on its vanes caught the light like the stripes of a passing animal. Tomas swore the quill shivered. Somewhere behind the fish stalls a cart horse snorted and a dog barked twice, then went quiet, as if listening.

She would not say where the feather came from. Only that the bird it belonged to had been large, and had flown across a border nobody else could see, and had left behind a single shadow of something golden that kept watch over the wet cobbles. Tomas asked whether the golden thing was dangerous. She laughed and tucked the feather into his coat pocket without taking a coin.

That night the rain stopped for the first time in a week. Tomas walked home through the empty square and felt the feather move against his ribs, slow and deliberate, the way a cat's tail does when it has decided not to leave the room.

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