Black ink line drawing design of a striped tiger seen from behind, sitting and looking up at small stars, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger seen from behind under stars

Fine line · Black and grey · Flash

A tiger is shown seated with its back to the viewer, head turned up and to the right towards a scatter of small four-point stars and dots. The striped body and tail are rendered in dense black linework and hatching, with the stars drawn as simple black marks. The image is monochrome on a plain white background, with the subject centred and the tail curling at the bottom.

Fine line Tiger Star Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger came aboard at Lerwick in a crate stencilled for the cannery, and by the second week nobody on the Margaret Ross could say who had decided it belonged to the crew. You had the night watch that month, which meant the bow, and the bow was where it chose to sit. It kept its back to the deck and its head tipped up and to the right, as if the sky had owed it money and was slow to pay.

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Skipper Alasdair Finnie said it was reading the stars. He had been at sea forty years and claimed he had never once seen a cat look at the sea. You didn't argue. You started learning the sky yourself: the Plough swinging low over the skerries, the small hard points that did not wander. Three nights the nets came up with nothing but jellyfish and a boot. The men muttered about bad luck and blamed the animal, and the animal went on staring upward, its striped flanks rising and falling like a slow tide.

On the fourth night the fog came off the Faroe bank so thick that the wheelhouse lamp made a yellow smear and no more. The compass card swam. You stood at the rail with your hands gone numb and could not tell up from down, until you looked forward and found the tiger, a darker shape against a patch of clear sky where a few stars still burned. Its tail curled down towards the water, and then, very slowly, it swung round to the north-west. You put the wheel over and trusted it.

At dawn the fog lifted off Scalloway like a sheet pulled from a bed. The tiger stood, shook itself, and walked down the gangway onto the quay without a backward glance, leaving wet prints on the planks. The crate was still in the hold the next morning, lid open, straw pressed flat in the shape of something that had sat a long time. Skipper Finnie never mentioned the stars again, though he took to leaving the bow light off.