Black line drawing of a tiger's face, front on, with bold stripes and tapering fur strokes on a white background, shown as a design rather than on skin.

Tiger head stencil design

Black and grey · Flash

A front-facing tiger head with its ears, eyes, nose and whiskers drawn in solid black shapes. The stripes and fur are rendered as tapering bold strokes with no shading, and the figure fades into loose strokes across the neck and shoulders. The image is a single black design on a plain white background.

Tiger Big cat Stencil

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, shush now, and mind the chair, it's older than the both of us. You want the tiger? Everybody wants the tiger. It came into the Palais de Lowther in the autumn of 1951, rolled up under Sid Pellow's arm like a bit of old carpet. It was nothing but a stencil cut from oiled card, and Sid had been a sign-writer before the war, so he couldn't stop making letters out of everything. He had the cut-out in one hand and a tin of black size in the other, and he told the caretaker, "Mind the stripes, they're the only honest bit."

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Sid painted it across the back wall above the bandstand, every stripe pulled tapering from the spine like a brushstroke that had changed its mind halfway. The whiskers he did in one flick each, quick as a flinch. The ear tips curled like the brims of a bowler. Dancers stopped to gawp up at it, and Ronnie Vell, who led the band, swore the eyes followed his saxophone. Nobody believed him until the night the mains failed at ten past eleven and the only thing you could see in the hall was that face, pale where the black had been left bare.

Ada Marsh ran the cloakroom and had a pair of dancing shoes resoled four times over. She told Sid the cat was looking at her. He said it was looking at the whole room, that was the trick of a good face, it didn't pick. She didn't believe him, so the next Saturday he cut her a stencil of her own and she painted crooked stripes on the cloakroom door. They married that Christmas, and the tiger watched the wedding from the wall.

They knocked the Palais down in 1968 to make flats. The wall went with it, but I've still got the original card in my drawer, and look here at the bottom edge, where the shoulders fade into nothing. Sid never finished them. Ada called him down for his tea, and he said a proper tiger always has somewhere else to be.