Watercolour-style tiger head tattoo in orange, blue and black with small script beneath it, on the side of a torso over the ribs.

Watercolour tiger head with script on ribs

Ribs · Mixed · Photo

A tiger's head with striking green eyes and dark stripes, rendered with loose, bleeding washes of orange, blue, red and black. Handwritten black script runs beneath the muzzle, and the image is a close side view of the torso.

Ribs Tiger Script Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are up a ladder at the Marine Ballroom in Scarborough at six on a Saturday, the sea wind shoving through the open doors, and the tiger on the back wall is still wet. Mr Halloran wanted something that would make the dancers look twice, a tiger rising out of orange and blue as if it had swum up from the bay. You mixed the washes too thin, so the colours bleed into each other the way they do in damp weather, and you decide the mistake is the best part of it.

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The band arrives in a clatter of cases. Sam, the drummer, leans on the rail and says the tiger looks like it has been crying into its own fur. You tell him that's the point. Nobody pays to see a tiger that stays politely inside its frame. Under the muzzle you paint the words Halloran insisted on in a loose black hand, and the ink soaks into the wet ground and feathers at the edges, so the letters seem to drift off the wall.

By nine the floor is full and the tiger has dried into something better than you planned. The green of its eyes sits true, the one colour you didn't have to fight for. Halloran stands below with a cigarette, squinting up, and says it's the finest thing you've ever done. You don't argue. You are watching a woman in a yellow dress turn under the lights, her shadow sliding across the striped flank, and you think that paint, like anything worth doing, goes where it likes once you let it go.

At midnight, during the last waltz, you pack your brushes while the lamps buzz above the floor. The tiger looks almost alive in the amber light, its stripes running into the blue like tide over sand. You wipe the brush on your sleeve, switch off the ladder lamp, and leave the eyes to keep watch over the empty room.