Black and white photo of a shirtless man kneeling on a bed with his back to the camera, showing a large tiger tattoo across his back and a tattooed upper arm.

Tiger tattoo across a man's back and arm

Japanese · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A shirtless man kneels on a bed with his back to the camera, arms raised and holding a white cloth. A large tiger with swirling shapes covers much of his back, and tattooed linework continues over his upper arm. The black and white photograph has soft, directional light against a plain pale wall, with the tattoo shading and fine detail clearly visible.

Japanese Back Upper arm Tiger Swirl Man Back tattoo Sleeve

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Take it to an artist as a reference. A good artist will make it yours rather than copy someone else's tattoo.

A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the lamp before one of you sets your sleeve alight. Aye, that's the cook's nephew, and he'll tell you the tiger was a tale the Margate men invented to sell rum. He wasn't there. I was, in the year the Hesper rounded the Horn with her sails in ribbons and the bosun Tobias Reddy swore on his dead mother that the sea itself had stripes.

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It began off the Cape in a cat's-eye calm, a grey oil on the water that gave back nothing. On the third morning our wake stopped looking like water. It curled into long whorls, turning over on themselves like the grain of old pine, and out of the middle of them rose a striped head as broad as a hatch cover. Nobody spoke. Captain Ingram Vole took off his hat and held it against his chest, the way you would at a graveside.

The beast kept pace with us for nine days. It never once came aboard, though the boy Peter swore it looked at him like a man weighing the price of a coat. On the tenth night the wind came back all at once, the Hesper ran for home with her topsails full, and the tiger turned its flank to the moon and sank into the swirls of its own making. By morning the water lay flat and dull again. Only the cook found a scrap of white cloth snagged on the rail, soft as a handkerchief, with no weave to it he could name.

We took the cloth to Bristol and nobody there would buy it. Peter keeps it still, folded in oilskin, and he says that's why the tiger never came back for him. Drink up, and mind the stairs going down.