Japanese style tattoo of a white tiger prowling among red flowers and dark waves across the upper arm and shoulder.

White tiger with red flowers and waves on upper arm

Japanese · Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A white tiger with pale grey and teal shaded stripes stalks forward, its head and clawed paw large in the frame. Red blossoms and dark, curling wave shapes fill the background, with black linework defining the fur and water. The colour is limited to red, teal and grey against black ink, and the design wraps around the upper arm.

Japanese Upper arm Shoulder Tiger Flower Red flower Wave Claw Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You hear the tiger before you see it, which is how the old women on Kessun say it always goes. There is no roar, only the sea pulling back off the stones below the shrine, a long hiss through shingle that does not come back the way it went. You are mending nets on the harbour wall with your grandmother's hook, the gulls have gone quiet, and when you look up the white tiger is standing at the top of the steps as if it had walked out of the wave itself.

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Its stripes are not black on this one but the grey-blue of deep water seen from above, and where the light catches its shoulder you can see foam folded into the fur. Behind it the red flowers that grow only on the cliff above the village have come down in a drift, petals riding the tide line. It descends one step at a time. A forepaw lifts, hangs, and sets itself on the stone with the claws spread, the way a fisherman plants a foot on a slick deck.

You should be frightened. Instead you remember what your grandmother told you: a white tiger takes only what the sea has already decided to keep. So you stand, drop the hook, and say the name of the boat that went out three nights ago and has not come back. The tiger stops. Its eyes, green as bottle glass, move past you to the empty slipway, and then, for the first time, it turns towards the water and roars, so low that the whole harbour answers.

When the tide turns that evening, the boat lies on the shingle, dry and upright, with the nets still tangled in its hull. Nobody in Kessun ever saw the tiger leave. You still find red petals in the net bags every morning, and you still set one on the bottom step for it.