Realism tattoo of a tiger's head in orange, black and white with green leaves behind it, on a person's upper arm and shoulder.

Tiger head with foliage on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A large tiger's face faces the camera, with detailed black stripes, white whisker pads and amber eyes. Green leaves and dark shaded foliage frame the head and fill the lower edge of the design. Soft shading gives the fur depth, and the colour ink is vivid against the surrounding skin.

Realism Upper arm Tiger Leaves Foliage Whiskers Stripe

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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 fog came off the river at midnight and sat on the wall of the old Rotherhithe timber yard like a cat that had already decided. Marjorie Quayle had the key to the padlock in her coat pocket and a torch she did not switch on. Somebody had been taking the copper from the drying sheds, and the foreman, a man named Dobbs who smelled of liquorice and fear, had sworn it was a gang from Bermondsey. Marjorie had her doubts about that. Gangs did not leave green leaves pressed flat in the mud.

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She found the first one by the gate, pale as a palm print. Then another under the stacked oak, and another beside the fallen crane hook, each one bent toward the water as if something large had walked that way and taken its time about it. Her torch finally came on. The beam caught two amber points low in the dark between the timber stacks, steady and unblinking, and then the whole head rose into the light, striped and enormous, the white ruff of the cheeks gleaming wet.

She did not run. Her grandfather had kept a tiger in a painted cage at the Canterbury fair when she was small, and he had taught her the one thing the animal could never be argued out of: it had already decided what it was going to do, and it was only waiting for you to understand. The tiger looked at her the way the old man had looked at the till, full of patience and no interest in lies.

When she walked out at dawn, the copper was back on the shed roof where it belonged, bright in the grey light. Dobbs was never told. The leaves were still in the mud when the tide came up, and nobody in the yard ever again said the word gang.