Black and grey drawing of a snarling tiger head framed by two lotus flowers, shown as a tattoo design on paper.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger head with lotus flowers

Dotwork · Black and grey · Flash

A snarling tiger head is drawn face-on, with its open mouth showing bared fangs and whiskers extending outward. Two layered lotus flowers cover the tiger's brow and cheek, and a fan of petals sits beneath the jaw. Bold outlines are combined with fine hatching and dense dotwork shading, all in black ink on a warm paper background.

Dotwork Neo-trad Tiger Lotus Flower Big cat Whiskers

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lotus pond at Sennet Reach had been dry for three generations when the tiger came up out of the mud carrying a child's shoe in its mouth. Nobody in Low Vell had seen a tiger since the grey years. The old women said it had walked out of the sea wall in the shape of the striped beasts in their grandmothers' picture books, with two pale blooms opening at its brow. Harrow Cott, who kept the ferry, went out with a lantern and a coil of rope.

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The tiger did not run. It sat among the cracked clay and let the lantern find its teeth, and when Harrow lifted the rope it only turned its head so the flowers caught the light. Petals of old bronze unfolded from its cheek, layer on layer, and where they touched the ground the clay went soft and dark. 'You want water,' Harrow said. The whiskers, long as oars, lifted in answer.

The pond had been sealed under the reservoir by the Authority, which sold water by the litre to the towers on the hill. Harrow broke the seal that night with a borrowed hammer, and the water came up black and sweet. The tiger drank until the lotus opened all the way, then stood and walked back down toward the sea without once looking round.

Three weeks later the Authority's men arrived with their meters and found every tap in the towers running clear. Harrow never said what the tiger had taken in return. She only said it had been exact about the matter, and that a tiger at a lotus pond can be trusted to count, even if the Authority cannot.