Black and grey tiger head sleeve tattoo covering the upper arm and forearm of a man wearing a tank top and snapback cap.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger sleeve on a raised arm

Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A black and white photograph of a man in a white tank top, camouflage shorts and a snapback cap, with his head tilted down. His right arm is covered in a sleeve of black and grey tattoos, including a large tiger head near the shoulder and ornamental, shaded pieces running down to the forearm. The shading is smooth and the composition frames the arm against a building and palm trees.

Upper arm Forearm Tiger Ornamental Sleeve Man

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mrs Orla Penhallow was the first to see the tiger, because she was the one standing nearest the tea urn when it came through the double doors of the school hall on the Saturday of the reunion. She put down the tongs and said nothing. Thirty-one years of geography had taught her that shouting only made children worse, and the animal was far too large to be a child.

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The old pupils were grey now, or going that way. They had come in from the terraces and the bus depot and the new estates past the reservoir, carrying the debts they had all run up at that school. The tiger was striped in the manner of old ink, black on grey, and the stripes ran down its flank in curling borders like a pattern worked into cloth. Where its shoulder met the wall the lines thinned into leaves, and the leaves into smoke, so nobody could say where the beast stopped and the ornament began.

Dennis Vaughan, who had once hidden a stolen register beneath the stage, walked over with his hands in his pockets. He asked the tiger what it wanted. It yawned, which Dennis took as an answer, and then lowered its heavy head so he could read the name scratched behind its ear. It was the name he had carved into a desk in 1979 and sworn he had never touched.

By nine the hall was empty and the tiger had gone, leaving one stripe of ash across the parquet. Mrs Penhallow swept it up herself and tipped it into the paper bin, as the rules required, and went home to bed.