Colourful watercolour-style tiger head tattoo with pink, orange, yellow and green splashes across the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Watercolour tiger head on upper back

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A tiger's head in profile faces right, with orange, yellow, pink and blue ink and bold black stripes. Loose watercolour splashes and dots spread from the left of the head across the skin. The photo is taken from behind, showing the upper back and shoulder blade, with the head cropped out of frame.

Back Tiger Watercolour Splashes Paint splatter

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Carrow House believed Dev could paint a tiger, least of all Dev. He'd spent June on the stairwell wall with a mop and a bucket of council grey, and when I told him the caretaker would have him for it, he only shrugged and fetched his nan's tin of watercolours from the cupboard under the sink. The pans were cracked and half of them had dried to chalk, but he wet the brush on his tongue the way she used to and started with a wash of pink by the bin chute.

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By the second week the wall had a shoulder in it, then a jaw. Mrs Ayodele from nine came up to complain about the smell of turpentine and stayed twenty minutes, arms folded, while the tiger's head came out of the paper like it had been waiting. Stan from the lift crew leaned on his trolley and said nothing at all, which from Stan was a review. Dev splashed a streak of teal across the landing when the lift doors banged, and he laughed so hard he had to sit on the bottom step.

In the third week the lift died between floors with six of us inside. We sat on the stairs with a torch and a packet of custard creams while the fire brigade took their time, and Dev, who had no business being in the building at all, climbed up to the landing with the tin. Nobody asked him to. He mixed the last of the yellow with a drop of his dad's Indian ink and put the eye in while we watched, and it looked straight at us, bright as a streetlamp, like it had somewhere better to be and would wait for us anyway.

The council painted the wall magnolia in October. You can still see the splashes through it if the light comes in low, little ghost dots that won't be painted out. Dev moved to Leeds. When the lift sticks now I count the stairs, and somewhere around the eleventh floor I look for that yellow eye, which is never there, and carry on climbing.