Colour tattoo of a tiger face with striped butterfly wings and green eyes, with black outlines and drips, on a person's shoulder blade.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger face with butterfly wings on shoulder

Shoulder · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a tiger's face whose ears and upper head form the wings of a butterfly, with orange and brown stripes, green eyes and a pink nose. Black outlines define the wing edges and the drips below the muzzle, and the shading is soft across the fur. It sits on the upper back over the shoulder blade, with the photo cropped close around the design.

Shoulder Tiger Butterfly Eye Stripe Wing

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The sign painter had been dead a fortnight when the new manager decided the tiger had to come down. Ivo Marchetti had painted it across the ballroom ceiling in the summer of 1951, a great orange thing with butterfly wings where its ears should have been, and green eyes that followed you from the door to the bandstand. Nobody else had dared to draw an animal that wouldn't sit still.

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I was the only girl who still came in on Thursdays, so Mr Hale asked me to climb the scaffold with a bucket of ochre and a rag. "Just the eyes," he said. "Make them dull." I stood on the top plank with my cheek against the plaster and looked up at those green paints, still bright after twenty years, and at the black drips under the muzzle that Ivo had let run on purpose. He once told me a tiger should look as if it had been out in the rain.

I didn't touch them. I climbed down and told Hale the paint had soaked into the plaster and wouldn't lift without taking the ceiling with it, which was a lie, but a good one. That night the band played the last waltz with the lights low and the tiger watching from above, and I danced it with Ray from the gasworks, careful not to look up in case I saw it blink.

When the hall closed, Hale stood beneath the drips with his hands in his pockets and said nothing for a long while. Then he switched off the big lamp and left the ceiling in the dark, and without the light the wings were only shapes, and the eyes went on looking anyway.