Realistic coloured pencil drawing of a woman's face blended with a tiger's head and stripes, shown on paper as a tattoo design.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman and tiger portrait design

Realism · Mixed · Flash

The drawing shows a woman's face in a close, three-quarter view, with her left half merging into a tiger's head and striped fur. The woman's face and hair are rendered in soft grey shading with fine pencil strokes, while the tiger's stripes, eyes and whiskers are drawn in vivid orange, black and yellow-green. The sheet is photographed at an angle on a white board, with the design filling most of the frame.

Realism Woman Tiger Portrait Hair Whiskers Stripe Eye

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The snow had sealed the pass by the third day, so we took in whoever came down off the ridge, and the stranger who knocked at dusk was not someone my mother would have turned away in summer. She stood on the step with the cold rolling off her shoulders, one half of her face pale as the drifts and the other half banded orange and black, as if the lamplight had caught a fire that had not yet decided what to be. Her left eye was grey as slate. Her right was the colour of old brass, and it watched the hearth the way a dog watches a door.

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She asked for a bed by the fire and a bowl of broth, and paid with silver coins so worn that the kings on them had gone soft. My mother counted them twice. Nobody in our valley had seen that sort of money since my grandfather's day. The woman ate without speaking, tearing bread with her teeth, and when the fire guttered she lay down on the rug with her back to the room. I lay awake listening, and I heard something breathing in the dark that was not quite a woman's breath.

In the morning the sky was scraped clean and the rug was empty. A line of prints ran from the door to the treeline. Beside the boot marks ran others, broad as a child's hand and spaced in a long, easy stride, pressed deep where the drifts were thinnest.

My mother said nothing. She swept the hearth and set the kettle on, and only when I reached for the coins did she stop me. They were warm to the touch, and on the bolster lay a single hair, striped gold and black, as long as my arm. "Leave them where they are," she said. "She paid for the whole winter, and she'll be back for the change."