Two tattooed hands crossed over a denim jacket, one showing a black and grey wolf head and the other a colour tiger head, both in traditional style on the backs of the hands.

Wolf and tiger hand tattoos

Traditional · Hand · Mixed · Photo

Two hands are crossed over a denim jacket and camouflage shirt, each showing a large tattoo on the back of the hand. The upper hand has a black and grey wolf head with open jaws and bold outlines, while the lower hand has a tiger or big cat head in red, orange and teal with heavy black linework. Simple lettering and small circular designs sit across the knuckles and fingers.

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You find the wolf first, pacing the broken curtain wall above the moat where ferns have swallowed the steps. Your lantern burns cheap paraffin and smokes, and the keeper's lad has told you twice that the tiger lives in the chapel, not the wall, so you keep to the wall. Somewhere below, water drips off the portcullis chains like a slow clock.

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The tiger is in the chapel, of course. It lies across the flagstones before the altar, where the stained glass is gone and the rain comes in sideways, orange as a fox under the moss. It does not get up when you come in. Its eyes are two bright coins of teal paint someone flaked off a signboard a century ago. You set the lantern down between you and say what you came to say: the wolf has paced the wall for three nights, the village dogs won't go out after dark, and somebody has to decide whose hill this is.

The tiger yawns, showing every tooth the painter gave it, and asks what the wolf would offer for a truce. You tell it that you are not the wolf, and that you are not the village either. It laughs in the low way of something that has been in the dark too long. Then it rises, slowly, the way a shop sign swings when the wind changes, and walks past you into the rain.

By morning the wall is empty and the chapel smells of wet fur and tobacco. On the flagstone where the tiger lay there is one black hair, and beside it, pressed deep into the mortar, a paw print the size of a coin.

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