Traditional tiger head tattoo in black, orange and red on a torso, beside a colourful arm sleeve with an eagle and a leopard head.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Traditional tiger head on ribs with arm sleeve

Traditional · Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A bold tiger head with a wide open mouth and bared teeth sits across the midriff, outlined in heavy black with orange and red fill. The arm sleeve to the left includes an eagle with spread wings and a snarling leopard or cat head, with small black star accents near the elbow. The photo is well lit and shows the abdomen and arm in close framing, with the subject's face cropped out of view.

Traditional Ribs Forearm Upper arm Tiger Eagle Leopard Cat Star Sleeve

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The fiddler at Hollin Grange had played three nights to an empty floor, because the millers' sons had heard that a tiger had come down from the hills above Carrow and no girl would walk the lane home alone. On the fourth night a woman came in out of the rain with a spotted cloth knotted at her throat and a sleeve of inked birds and cats running from wrist to shoulder. Nobody asked her name. She asked for the tune called The Eagle Over Water, and the fiddler, who had only ever played it slow, played it fast.

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She danced with nobody. She went round the boards with her hands open, and where her boots came down the varnish blackened and a row of small stars showed in the wet. The millers' sons stood along the wall with their hats in their fists. When the tune ran hot she turned her head toward the door, and every lamp in the hall bent the same way, as if something large had breathed in.

At midnight the fiddler stopped to wet his bow. When he looked up the floor was bare, and a striped beast the size of a cart sat in the doorway with its mouth wide, teeth white as chalk. It did not roar. It looked at the wall where the men were standing, and each one remembered a debt, a lie, a girl he had left at a gate. One by one they walked out into the rain to make it right.

By morning the tiger had gone back to the hills and the woman had gone with it, or so the fiddler said. The hall stayed open, and the boys came back to dance, though they kept their hats on and their hands where the lamps could see them.