Colourful watercolour-style tattoo of a stylised big cat with loose black linework on the ribs of a bare torso.

Watercolour-style animal portrait on ribs

Ribs · Colour · Photo

A stylised animal face, likely a big cat, fills the flank with bold black linework over loose washes of orange, purple, pink and grey. Thin lines trail below the face into outlined leaves and dots, which spread across the lower part of the design. The tattoo sits on the side of the ribs, and the wash-like shading and open edges give it a painterly, sketched look.

Ribs Animal Lion Leaves Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lioness had watched over Harrow's feed store since before my grandfather could hold a brush, and by the second week of January the rain had got into her eyes. I came out with a bucket of size and a stiff brush, meaning to seal the paint before the frost, but Dad was already on the top rung of the ladder, one palm flat against the brick the way you'd feel a horse for fever.

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"Look at the mane," he said. "Forty years I've thought it was hair." The painter who did her had come up from the coast with a tin of watercolours and no plan, and he'd let the orange bleed into the purple until the whole beast seemed to be wading out of a sunset. Thin black lines ran from her chin down into the ivy, and somewhere in the leaves someone had dotted rust where the old nails were. "She's not a lion," Dad said. "She's a cat that's been out in the weather too long."

We spent the afternoon with sponges and a bucket of warm water, lifting the grime from her cheeks. Under the grey wash, where the paint had worn thin, there was a pencil line I had never seen, a cramped note in capitals along the mortar: WAIT TILL THE LEAVES COME DOWN. Dad read it twice and said nothing, then went back to rubbing.

By dusk the colours had run into the gutter and pooled in the frozen yard, pink and ochre going to mud. What stayed was the outline, black and certain, the first thing the painter had drawn and the last thing the rain would take. I stood on the ladder and traced her eye with one finger, and she looked back at me the way she had for sixty years, as if she knew exactly when the leaves would fall.