Colour tattoo of a tiger face within butterfly wings, with blue eyes and grey flowers, on the outer thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger face in butterfly wings on thigh

Botanical · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A tiger's face forms the centre of the design, with its striped orange and black fur shaped into butterfly wings. The eyes are shaded blue, and the surrounding grey flowers and vines are drawn in fine lines with soft shading. Orange and blue ink contrast with the grey botanical details against a green outdoor background.

Botanical Thigh Tiger Butterfly Flower Vine Blue eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger Orla had grown tired of being looked at from a distance. Every spring the villagers of Harrowmere Fell watched her pass along the orchard wall, and every spring they lowered their voices. Her stripes were the colour of wet bark and her eyes were the blue of a glacier lake, and she was tired of being admired for both.

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So she went to the old moth-woman who kept her bees and lanterns in the hollow beneath the hawthorn. "I want something that flutters," Orla said. The moth-woman laughed, a dry sound like pages turning, and asked what a tiger would trade for lightness. Orla offered her oldest roar. The moth-woman took it and gave back a pot of ochre paint and a pair of grey lace wings that smelled of cold cherry blossom.

The wings were heavy at first. Orla practised in the meadow, letting the clover tickle her ears while the wings opened and closed. Stripes ran out along the veins and pooled into orange where the sun sat. When she finally lifted from the ground, the hunters below saw only a flash of gold and a pair of watchful blue eyes, and they forgot to load their rifles.

But a roar cannot be given away without being missed. One night the children at the wall heard nothing, and the orchard fell quiet in the wrong way. Orla came back down at dawn, wings still folded, and found the moth-woman waiting beside a jar that glowed like a struck match. "Yours," the old woman said. Orla swallowed it whole, and the wings stayed where they were, one orange, one grey, and she roared until the hawthorn shook.