Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger head and flowers on an upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Colour · Photo

A tiger's head in side profile, with orange, black and white fur and detailed whiskers, sits above two flowers in purple and turquoise. Soft painterly washes of green, blue and orange flow behind the design. The tattoo is shown twice in side-by-side photographs against a dark background, with rich, saturated colour throughout.

Realism Botanical Upper arm Tiger Flower Tulip Wildflower Watercolour splash Smoke

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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

The tiger of Morrow Vale climbed out of the dye vats on the morning the Regent ordered every blue flower scraped from the palace walls, and I was the only one in the workshop holding a brush.

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It shook the orange and black from its coat like river water, and green smoke curled off its ears. Its whiskers were white as the chalk we used for sketching. The dyers of Pell Street had spent a season grinding bog-beetles into the purple of the tulips, and the tiger sniffed each petal as if checking the work. Then it looked at me with one narrowed eye and said, in the voice of my dead grandmother, that the Regent's men were already on the stairs.

I mixed a wash of turquoise and handed it up to the scaffold, and the tiger dipped its paw in and drew a wave across the plaster, slow and sure. Where the water ran, the bare wall bloomed. Two wildflowers opened beside the tulips, pale blue at the throat, and the smoke spread out behind them until the whole wall looked like a storm seen from a hill.

When the guards kicked in the door they found a wet scaffold, a stack of unwashed brushes and two flowers that had not been there at dawn. The Regent demanded to know where the tiger had gone. I told him it was painting the sea, and that he would have to wait for it to finish.