Traditional style tattoo of a snarling panther head with blue-outlined eyes and red mouth, on the inner upper arm.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional panther head on upper arm

Traditional · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A snarling big cat head, likely a panther, is shown in bold black outline with white and grey shading and blue detailing around the eyes, nose and whisker dots. Red and orange fill the inner ear and open mouth, with heavy black areas framing the head against the skin. The design fills the frame of an upper arm, centred on the head with the muzzle facing right.

Traditional Upper arm Panther Big cat Animal Head Whiskers

Find an artist for this

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

The abbot found the cat before Compline had finished ringing. He stood over my desk in the scriptorium with the psalter open between his hands, and I watched his jaw work the way it does when the kitchen has burned the bread again. "Brother Wulfric, there is a beast in the margin of the Miserere."

Keep reading

There was. I had painted it in the small hours, when the candle guttered and the others had gone to their pallets. It was black, heavy-shouldered, with a white muzzle and a pale spotted brow, and it had come to me whole from the travelling menagerie that pitched on the moor the summer before. I had sat up on a wall to watch it pace its cage, and I had never forgotten how it looked at the crowd as though the crowd were its dinner and it was only deciding when. I told the abbot none of this. I said the gilding was finished and the beast was only a small joke for the lay brothers who would one day read the Psalms aloud.

He leaned closer. The lamp caught the blue I had laid round its eyes and the red I had given the inside of its ear and its open mouth, and for a long moment he said nothing. Then he sat down heavily on the bench. "My father kept one of those in a cage at Ghent," he said. "It screamed like a woman every night and my mother could not sleep."

In the morning he sent word that the page would stay as it was. He asked only that I add a little more red to the throat, so that it looked as though it was shouting the Gloria. I did as he asked. I did not tell him the creature had been roaring all along.