Colour tattoo of a tiger paw print with a tiger face and black stripes in each toe pad, shown on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger paw print tattoo

Traditional · Colour · Photo

The tattoo shows a paw print where each toe pad and the main pad contains a tiger face or striped markings. Black outlines and stripes sit over orange, yellow and brown shading, with a white highlight on one of the faces. The pads are arranged in a rounded group against plain skin, and the image is clear and evenly lit.

Traditional Tiger Paw print Stripe Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Frost had fused the towpath into a grey skin, and Dilys Crane was already on her knees by the lock gate when Tom came up the hill with the lantern. "Don't stand on it," she said. "You'll blur the middle one."

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The print was as wide as a dinner plate. Five pads sat in a loose ring, and when he bent close he saw that each one was not plain mud but a face, striped and watchful, pressed into the ice as if the animal had walked straight out of a painting. The left toe held an eye the colour of weak tea. The heel held a snarl with its teeth showing.

"Menagerie," Dilys said. "Pickering's Travelling Wonders, the winter they wintered at the Mill Pool. Three tigers came off the rail at Devizes and nobody counted them back on." She tapped the ice with a gloved finger. "Old Pickering always swore the stripes were painted on. Painted on, my foot. Look at the claws."

Tom looked. Beyond the print the marks went on along the bank, one paw placed square in the last, and at the footbridge they simply stopped, as if whatever had made them had stepped off the world and into the black water.

He went back up the hill with the lantern held low, counting pads under his breath, and at the gate he realised he had been counting his own steps, and that there were five of them too.