Large tiger tattoo with black ink stripes and teal splashes across a woman's back and ribs, shown in two side-by-side photographs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger with teal ink splashes on back and ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A large tiger in mid-stride is tattooed across the ribs and back, with its head turned towards the viewer on the left side. The linework and shading use black ink for the stripes and dense markings, with loose drips and splatters running down the skin. Teal and green washes sit behind the tiger, and the two photographs show the same tattoo from slightly different angles against a tiled wall.

Ribs Back Tiger Stripe Ink splash Drip

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had shut the Coldharbour road for nine days, and by the ninth night the guests had stopped pretending to be polite about the cold. My mother kept the stove going on peat and the last of the coal, and the only thing that didn't complain was the stranger in room four, who sat up each evening with a jar of ink and a brush worn to a stub.

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He wouldn't say where he'd come from. He said he painted animals that had been in the district before the roads, and that the ink needed cold to set right. On the tenth morning he asked me for the stable door, which was the only wood in the place not already burned, and I held the lamp while he worked. He painted a tiger in mid-stride, its head turned back over its shoulder as if it had heard something coming up the lane. Black for the stripes, quick and wet, then a green so pale it looked like river light through ice, flung in splashes that ran down the grain in long drips.

"It's only paint," I said. He said that was what everyone thought about things that were going to leave. The wind dropped that afternoon and the road opened, with meltwater running in every rut. When I went out to the stable the next morning the tiger was still there, but the teal had run, pooling at the bottom of the door and dripping onto the cobbles in a thin green line.

I followed it down the lane to the beck, where the water had already taken the colour away. The stranger was gone, his room swept and the bed made tight. Where the green had gone into the stream, the beck ran the colour of a bruise for a hundred yards and then cleared, and I stood there until the cold got into my boots, then went back up to the inn to tell my mother the road was open.