Realism tattoo of a woman's face merged with a tiger's head in orange and black, on the outer thigh.

Woman and tiger portrait on a thigh

Realism · Thigh · Mixed · Photo

A woman's face is merged with a tiger's head, with the tiger's stripes and ears forming the left side and her hair flowing down the right. The face is shaded in soft greys with smooth blending, while the tiger is rendered in orange and black with bold stripes and fine whisker lines. Warm orange washes behind the tiger contrast with the grey tones of the portrait, and the design fills the frame against plain skin.

Realism Thigh Tiger Woman Portrait Face Whiskers Hair Stripe

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tiger came down through the larch wood three nights running, and on the third you stood at the pen gate with a lantern, counting the ewes twice, because your uncle had miscounted once and the difference had come out of his wages. Mud sucked at your boots. Past the stile a branch cracked, and the dogs, who had never barked at anything they could not name, went quiet under the cart.

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It stepped into the lantern light the colour of October bracken, the dusk still caught in the orange washes along its flanks, and it looked at you with one green eye and one grey one. You knew the grey eye. It was your mother's, the one that had clouded before she died, and the face was hers too, the cheekbones and the mouth set hard, as if she were about to tell you that you were getting above yourself. Its stripes ran down the centre of its brow like a parting in a woman's hair.

"You've been counting my supper," it said, in her voice, which was the worst part. You asked what it wanted. It said the squire's men had cut the wood back to the edge of the glebe, and it had nowhere left to lie down but in the village. It wanted the gate left open. You told it the ewes would be torn. It licked a line of frost from its whisker and said that was a thing you already knew about the village.

You opened the gate. In the morning the lambs were all there, every one, and a line of prints ran back into the larch wood, slowly filling with rain. Your uncle counted the flock and got the right number for once, and never asked why you were smiling at the trough. Caught on the top bar of the gate, lifting in the wind, was a long grey strand that might have been hair or might have been fur, and you left it there.