Traditional style arm sleeve with a tiger head, an all-seeing eye, a skull, a snake and a rose on a forearm and upper arm, in black outline with red, green and blue colour.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional sleeve with tiger, eye and snake

Traditional · Forearm · Mixed · Photo

Two arms are shown side by side, both covered in a traditional style sleeve. The designs include a tiger head, a Native American style headdress figure, an all-seeing eye within a pyramid, a woman's face, a skull, a snake and a rose, with stars and the word THIS on the centre arm. Bold black outlines and solid shading sit alongside red, green, blue and pink fills, so colour is present but black ink remains prominent.

Traditional Forearm Upper arm Tiger Eye Pyramid Headdress Woman Skull Snake Rose Star Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer, and mind the brazier, because the part about the tiger is where people get singed. Forty winters ago the Kingdom of Vell had three things it could never keep: a river that would not stay in its bed, a queen who would not sleep, and a tiger who would not die. The tiger lived in the palace kitchens. Nobody remembered inviting him. He ate the bread and left the bones on the steps, and when the cooks complained he simply yawned, showing the kind of teeth that make a magistrate reconsider his position.

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The queen was called Ysolde, and she owned a looking-glass ringed in red copper that showed not her face but whatever lay under the next day. One morning it showed a single eye, open above a triangle of stone, and beneath it a dark snake coiled around a rose picked far too early. She sent for the old headman of the Feather People, who came with his painted cheeks and his crown of bright quills. He studied the glass a long while before he said, "That is not a warning. That is an invoice."

So Ysolde went down to the river at midnight with a sack of silver and a bottle of the good red, and asked the snake what it wanted. The snake said nothing, because snakes are poor talkers. The skull on the bank spoke instead, in a voice like a bell rung underwater, saying the kingdom owed a debt older than the river and would be paid in whatever the stars were counting. Ysolde looked up. There were thirteen stars over Vell that night, and she had never once thought to count them.

She paid with a year of her own sleep, a coin the old kings never thought to mint, and the eye closed above the pyramid for good. The tiger went back to the kitchens and died of contentment at a great age. The rose was planted in the palace garden, where it blooms every spring, and nobody, not even the cooks, has ever been bitten by it. Now pass the bottle, and mind the brazier.