Black and grey realism tattoo of a tiger's head on the middle finger of a hand with dark glitter nail polish.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger head tattoo on a finger

Realism · Hand · Black and grey · Photo

A small tiger's head is tattooed on the middle finger, facing forward with its eyes, nose and striped brow shaded in grey and black. The shading is soft and graduated, with a lighter muzzle and fine dark stripes. The image is a close, well-lit photograph with a dark background and a second hand resting beneath the tattooed finger.

Realism Hand Tiger Big cat Animal

Find an artist for this

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 came aboard the Mercy Ann in a crate stencilled FRAGILE, which was the first lie my father told me about it. For thirty-one years he had hauled coal and then scrap down the Trent, and he had never carried anything with a face. The crate rocked when we went through Cromwell Lock, and something inside breathed out like a bellows.

Keep reading

I prised the lid off with the lock iron while he was asleep in the wheelhouse. Inside, wrapped in an old sail, was a carved head no bigger than a fist, its brow ridged with black, its muzzle worn pale where a hundred hands had rubbed it. A card said it had come from a stall in Gainsborough market, sold by a woman who would not say where she had found it. I set it on the stove shelf, where the warmth could reach it, and went back to bed.

By morning the head was on the sill facing the water. Dad said nothing about it over his tea, only that the river was high and we would be tied up at Torksey by dark. Every night after that the tiger sat at the window, and every night the lamp on the bank caught its eyes so that the carved gaze seemed to follow the barge downstream.

When the doctor came in October and said the hospital bed would have to go in the front room, Dad asked me to carry the tiger ashore. "Keep it facing upriver," he said. "It will know the way back." I set it on the sill of his new room, and the light off the water moved across its stripes like something breathing.