Traditional panther head tattoo on a woman's neck, with small finger and hand tattoos, wearing a white shirt.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional panther head on the neck

Traditional · Neck · Black and grey · Photo

A bold panther head sits on the neck above a white shirt collar, with a snarling face, bared teeth and pale whiskers drawn in heavy black outline. The shading is mostly solid black with grey tones, and small red accents appear on the nose and mouth. The tight crop frames the neck and both hands, which show fine ink on the fingers and wrists.

Traditional Neck Hand Forearm Panther Cat Head Finger Wrist

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the Vell road ever saw the panther come down from the hills, only the marks it left behind. Three claw lines would be raked through the red paint of a mile post, or a tin sign would be found face down in the sand with its corners bent. Ossie Crane kept the water station at kilometre forty and kept a ledger of every sign, because his father had, and because a man with a ledger is harder to frighten.

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In August a lorry driver called Teodor Ilse came in off the flats with a bottle of gin in his coat and a story he did not want to tell. The cat had walked alongside his cab for six miles, keeping pace with the headlamps, its eyes the colour of tea held up to a window. When he stopped, it sat down in the middle of the road and yawned at him, all those teeth, and then it went off into the dark as if it had remembered an appointment. Ossie wrote it down. Everyone who crossed the flats had a version, and every version happened when the wind turned and the barrels ran low.

Mae, Ossie's daughter, was nine and had no interest in versions. The next evening she took the tin cup from its hook and walked out past the fence with the water still sloshing in it. Ossie went after her with the torch and found her sitting in the sand with the panther's great black head on her knee, both of them looking at the tank as if it owed them money. Ossie's mouth went dry. The cat lifted its lip at him, showing a glint of red at the gums, and then it looked back at Mae.

The rule of the flats is that you never refuse a thirsty thing, and Ossie had never believed a word of it until Mae held out the cup. The panther drank with its eyes closed. Then it rose, stretched, and walked west into the dusk without once looking back. The tank level, which had been falling all summer, stopped falling.

In the morning Ossie opened the ledger to a clean page and found a single claw line drawn across it in grey ink, neat as a signature. Mae said she had done it while he slept. He never asked her how a nine-year-old had learned to make a mark like that, and she never told him.