Black and grey drawing of a woman with long wavy hair wearing a tiger head as a headdress, in neo-traditional style, shown with coloured pencils.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Woman with tiger headdress drawing

Neo-trad · Black and grey · Flash

A shaded pencil drawing of a woman's face and shoulders, with a snarling tiger's head forming a headdress above her. She wears a beaded chain ornament at her temple and has long, wavy dark hair. The image uses soft grey shading and fine linework on a pale background, with a few coloured pencils in the top left corner.

Neo-trad Realism Woman Tiger Headdress Portrait Hair Bead Chain

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Right, sit down, the lot of you, and mind the pram. Nobody on the fourteenth floor of Harrow Court ever saw the tiger come up the stairs, because it didn't use the stairs. It came up the lift shaft the night the power went out in February, and it sat on the landing outside Mrs Okonedo's flat with its great striped head held level, like a bailiff waiting for the rent.

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Her son Tobi was nine and had already decided he would not be frightened of anything with whiskers. He took a torch and a tin of sardines and went out to see. The tiger didn't roar. It only looked at him with those heavy-lidded eyes, then turned its head slowly to the left, toward the window, where the city was all dark except for the orange glow of the ring road.

Tobi followed the look. Out there, a bead of light moved across the car park: a woman walking home from the late bus, a silver chain looped at her temple, catching the lamps as she went. The tiger's ears went flat. Tobi understood then. It was not guarding the landing. It was keeping watch for the one who had once kept the whole block warm with her singing, and who had gone out into the dark three winters back and never come home.

So Tobi did the only sensible thing. He opened the sardines, set one on the step, and said, loud enough for the lift shaft to carry, "She's coming up now. You can go home." The tiger blinked slow as a clock. When the lift doors groaned open at the end of the corridor, the landing was empty except for a single bead on the lino, cool and round, and the smell of cold rain.