Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger head in profile on the upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A tiger's head faces left in profile, with its whiskers, brow and striped cheek drawn in detail. The linework is fine and the fur is built up with soft shading and stippled texture in black and grey ink. The tattoo sits on pale skin near the shoulder blade, with a denim jacket draped over the shoulder at the bottom of the frame.

Realism Fine line Back Tiger Big cat Animal Portrait

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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 rain had been at the tarpaulins since six, so by eleven the covered market by the canal smelled of wet cardboard and fried onions, and nobody came near my trestle except to shelter. I had a biscuit tin of my uncle Ray's engraving plates, copper and zinc, most of them scratched past use. The one that mattered was wrapped in a page of the Yorkshire Post from 1961 and tied with garden twine.

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When I unwrapped it, the tiger turned its head towards the left-hand edge of the paper as if someone had called from the next room. Ray had built the fur out of thousands of tiny pricks with a needle, so from a yard off it looked like smoke and up close it looked like something rubbed soft by hands. He never saw a tiger in the flesh. He copied it from a photograph of a zoo animal that was looking away from the camera, and he always said that was the trick of it: you give a thing its back to you and it still has to be watching something.

A young man in a heavy wax coat stopped at the trestle and asked, very politely, whether I was selling the tiger or just showing it. He said his nan had kept a print of one above her gas fire, and she had died before he could ask her where it went. I told him a pound. He looked at me as though I had made a mistake, so I said it again, and he counted out the coins in the palm of his hand.

He held the plate up under the edge of the awning to photograph it, and the rain came off the canvas in a thin rope and ran across the copper. It gathered in the engraved stripes and sat there, bright and shivering, so for a moment the tiger had something to drink.