Watercolour tiger head design

A painter called Oswin Pell was stranded with us that week, a thin man with ink on his cuffs and a tin box of pans and little brass-capped bottles. He'd once seen a tiger in a menagerie down in Bristol before the creature died of the damp, and he meant to paint it back into being from memory. Each evening he sat at the long table with his sheet of good paper and the snow ticking at the shutters, laying in pink and blue and the sunset orange, then drawing the black stripes over the top like iron bars. The red ran out on the third night. He mixed what was left with spit and a drop of the blue, and swore the colour would stay where he put it.

Nell, the innkeeper's girl, came down before light on the fifth morning and found the sheet warm to the touch. A swirl of orange smoke had crept up over the top corner, and the tiger's eyes, which he'd left blank, were now the pale blue of snow under a clear sky. Oswin was asleep with his head on his arms. When he woke he tried to lift the paper away, and the paint would not come off the table, only spread like a tide.

The thaw came on the Sunday and the coach went off down the valley. Oswin left the sheet pinned above the hearth, the tiger staring out with its ink stripes and its drifting pink fire. Nobody has ever managed to take it down. So when the snow comes in under the door and the flames go rose at the edges, mind your hands on the hearth, that's all I'll say.