Black and grey blackwork tattoo of a snarling tiger head inside a cross on the inner forearm of a person wearing grey clothing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger head inside a black cross on a forearm

Blackwork · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A solid black cross sits on the inner forearm, with a snarling tiger head filling its vertical and horizontal sections. The tiger's eyes, bared fangs and striped markings are rendered in heavy black fill with grey shading and fine detail. The image is a close, slightly angled shot against a pale brick wall, with the person's grey clothing at the left edge and the hand at the bottom.

Blackwork Forearm Cross Tiger Big cat Animal head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

No, sit nearer, the fire wants feeding and so do you. Pass me that split larch. The tiger at Sorrow Gap was never a beast you could bargain with, and the brothers who cut the cross into the gatepost knew it. Every carter who climbed from the valley dropped a copper into the iron box beneath that stone, and the coppers kept the roof on the abbey through three hard winters.

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Brother Anselm counted those coppers. He was a thin man with ink on his fingers, and he trusted sums more than prayers. One autumn a carter called Corran Dhu came up the pass with a cart of nothing but rusted hinges and no coin at all. The fog rolled down off the crags, and out of it came the tiger, its jaws open wide enough to swallow the mule whole, its stripes black as wet slate in the grey light. Corran Dhu fell to his knees. Anselm did not.

He walked straight into the mouth of the beast and told it the truth. The abbey would starve if it took the hinges, and the carter had four children waiting in the lowland village. The tiger sat back on its haunches and stared at the cross on the gatepost for a long time, as if it were reading. Then it asked for the one thing the monks had never once thought to give, which was the abbey's own debt. Anselm, who had counted everything, understood at last that the box had never been full. He emptied it onto the snow and let the coppers go.

When the sun came up, the box held a single copper, and a fresh stripe had been scored down the gatepost beside the cross. Corran Dhu drove his cart down the mountain without paying a thing. If you go up there yourself, mind the box, and mind your tongue.