Watercolour drawing of a tiger head in pink, blue and orange on white paper, shown as a tattoo design rather than on skin.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour tiger head design

Colour · Flash

A painted tiger head with bold black striped markings and blue eyes, drawn on white paper beside paint tubes and pencils. The linework is loose and fluid, with soft watercolour washes fading from pink and magenta into blue and purple. Splashes of pink and orange drift up from the head and down the lower edge, leaving the composition open around the figure.

Tiger Paint splash Watercolour wash

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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

Sit closer, you lot, and mind the fire, because this is the tale of how the tiger of Qessamar lost its colour and found it again in the river. In the old kingdom of Qessamar, where the dyers kept their vats along the Ilun, there lived a painter named Osric Vell who could not paint a thing that stayed still. Every cat he drew stretched, and every heron he sketched took flight before the ink dried.

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One wet spring the Governor commissioned a tiger for the gate of the water palace, a beast to frighten the barges. Vell had only a single tiger's head to work from, carried in from the hills with its eyes already gone milky. So he did what no sensible man would do. He mixed his madder with the blue from the mussel vats, wet the pale wall of his studio, and let the colours run wherever they pleased.

The Governor came to see it on the third morning and said nothing for a long time. The jaw was pink as a dawn cloud. The mane bled down into violet and then into the cold blue of the deep river, and across the brow ran black stripes drawn so fine they looked like cracks in ice. The eyes were the blue of a sky seen through water, and ink spatters drifted from the shoulders like sparks from a forge.

"It is not a tiger," the Governor said at last. "It is weather."

Vell only shrugged, and the tiger, they say, has been weather ever since. Hang your finest cloth beside it and watch which one the wind bends toward. That is why the dyers of Qessamar still mix their own black before they touch a brush.