Colour tiger tattoo on the upper arm, framed by a black tribal band with swirling and triangular patterns.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Tiger within a tribal band on upper arm

Realism · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A crouching tiger with orange, white and black stripes is the central subject, with its front paws reaching towards the bottom of the frame. It is surrounded by a black tribal-style band of spirals, scrolls and triangular points that encloses the design. The tiger uses coloured shading for fur and face, while the surrounding ornament is solid black with grey tones on the skin, and the photo is taken straight on against a dark background.

Realism Upper arm Tiger Big cat Tribal Swirl Triangle Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Mae Doyle had been up since four breaking the ice on the water trough when the lorry came off the bend below Halse Farm, its trailer split open on the verge like a tin of sardines. She saw the cage door hanging and the snow already drifting into it, and she saw the tiger before anything else, standing very still in the lane with its breath going up in pale clouds.

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It did not run at her. It walked past the gate, past the ewes huddled in the lee of the hedge, and climbed the bank into the open-fronted implement shed as if it had been expected. Mae followed with a bucket of mash she had no intention of using, and found it lying across a heap of straw, its great front paws stretched towards the doorway as though it were holding a place for someone who had not yet arrived.

The men from the travelling show came by mid-morning, grey-faced, arguing about insurance and the price of a replacement animal. Mae let them talk. She watched the low sun slant through a gap in the boards and throw a lattice of shadow across the animal's flank, black scrolls over orange and white, and she thought of the frost ferns she had scraped off the kitchen window every morning that week, curling and spiralling in the same unbroken pattern.

When the cage was finally dragged up the bank on ropes, the tiger rose without fuss and stepped inside. Mae stood by the gate with her hands in her pockets until the lorry was a smudge on the lane. Then she went back to the shed and found a single orange hair caught on a nail, and she left it there, because the ewes needed feeding and the frost was already coming back on the glass.