Black and grey butterfly tattoo on upper back with tiger faces shaded into the wings, with a touch of blue on the right wing.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger-wing butterfly on upper back

Realism · Back · Black and grey · Photo

A butterfly whose wings are formed by two tiger faces, with bold black outlines along the wing edges and a slim black body. The tigers are shaded in soft black and grey tones with fine markings on the fur, and a faint blue tint appears on the right wing. The butterfly sits centrally on the upper back, with a bra strap visible at the right edge of the frame.

Realism Back Butterfly Tiger Big cat Wing Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The cook's boy found the tiger in the hold nine weeks out of Bristol, curled around a sack of dried peas as if it had paid for the space. Nobody on the Marigold would say who had brought it aboard. Captain Haddow said it could stay so long as it ate nothing but rats, and the rats, to everyone's relief, went quiet.

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It was a quiet animal. It sat at the rail in the mornings with its great striped face turned to the south, and the men said it was homesick, though nobody could say what a tiger's home looked like from a ship. Old Mercy Dunn, who had sailed the Cape run for thirty years, said the animal was not homesick at all. It was waiting for weather.

The weather came off the Cape in the third week of March, a black wall of it that took the topsail and both boats. In the worst of it Jonah Penrose, who was twelve and had no business being on deck, lost his footing near the bow and went over. He came up once, and the tiger was already in the water beside him, and then the sea closed and there was nothing to see but foam.

They found him at first light, clinging to a spar with his cap still jammed on his head. The tiger was gone. Where it had been swimming there was only a pale patch on the grey water, and above it a pair of wings, one streaked with black and one catching the blue of the coming sky, lifting slowly into the wind.

Mercy Dunn said that was how it went with tigers that had nowhere left to be. Jonah never argued with her. He kept the cap, and every March after, when the wind turned, he went up on deck to watch for the wings.