Flash design of a tiger head with orange and yellow shading, framed by bold black tribal flame shapes on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger head within tribal flames

Mixed · Flash

A front-facing tiger head with amber, orange and yellow fur, dark stripes and piercing eyes sits at the centre of the design. Solid black tribal flame shapes curl around the head on both sides and above it. The colour fills are smooth and the black flames have sharp, bold edges on a plain white background.

Tiger Big cat Flame Animal portrait

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The left eye was the problem. Ruth had got the amber right on the first pass, a hot ochre that the sodium lamp turned almost orange, but the pupil sat a shade too high and the whole face looked as if it was about to ask her something. She stepped back off the pavement, nearly into the road, and Dev caught her elbow without looking up from his phone.

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They had until six, when the hoarding crew came down Kirkgate with the van. The board leaned against the shutter of a closed chippy, twelve feet of ply, and the tiger was meant to announce the fairground opening on the old car park by the canal. Dev held the ladder and read out the client's messages in a flat voice, each one asking for the stripes to be bolder. Ruth ignored him and cut the black flames with a rigger brush, letting them curl up and over the tiger's ears like smoke caught in a draught.

At half four a night bus crawled past and the driver flicked his headlights twice, as if he knew the tiger was watching him. Ruth looked at the left eye again. It was slightly wrong, a little tired, the way eyes look after a long shift at the end of a long week. She decided to leave it. The client could have a new board in the autumn if they didn't like it.

By the time the van came round the corner the paint had set. The first light was grey over the gasworks, and when the crew hauled the board upright the sodium glow caught the tiger's eyes and held them there, bright and a little unfinished, above the car park and the canal and the people who would walk under it that morning without once looking up.