Small watercolour-style tiger face tattoo in purple and blue ink on the inner wrist.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger face on the inner wrist

Forearm · Colour · Photo

A tiger's face is drawn in loose dark linework with soft purple and blue wash and splashes of ink around the edges. The eyes and muzzle are the darkest areas, while the fur stripes fade into lighter sections of the design. The small tattoo sits centrally on a pale wrist against a dark background, with the forearm and sleeve partly visible.

Forearm Tiger Big cat

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mind the step there, the third one always gives. Aye, that's the lamp room you're looking at, and the brass has gone green since the war, but the lens is sound. My father polished it every Sunday of his life and never once let a gull sit on the rail.

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The tiger came up the coast road in the autumn of nineteen-twelve, in a circus caravan with a cracked wheel and a painted sign that said the Maharani's Menagerie, though nobody in Skerrow had ever seen a maharani. The beast was white as a sheet on a line, striped in grey like weather coming over the water. The men who brought it wanted coal money to keep going south, and my father gave them a shilling and the loan of a cart. He told my mother the animal looked at him the way the sea does before a squall, patient and not much interested in him at all.

It was the night of the big fog that the cat got loose. Sixty men on the rocks with lanterns, and the lamp going round above them like a slow heart, and then a sound from the cliff path like someone tearing good linen. My father climbed the spiral with the tiger behind him, claws on the iron, and sat up in the lamp room until dawn with its great head on his knee. In the morning the wash had come off the glass in streaks, violet and blue, where the beast had breathed on it. We never did scrub those marks out.

So when you ask why the lamp throws that colour, the one the fishing boats call the bruise light, that's the answer I give. Go on now. Mind the third step.