Tiger Tattoo Ideas, Designs and Meaning

What a tiger tattoo means

The tiger is the counterweight to the lion. Where the lion is authority granted, the tiger is power that answers to nobody — solitary, unruled, and in most traditions faintly dangerous to be near. People who choose a tiger over a lion are usually choosing that difference on purpose.

In Japanese tradition the tiger is a protective animal, tied to wind and to the west, and it is conventionally drawn either fighting or under bamboo. The bamboo is not decoration: the tiger shelters in it during storms, so a tiger-and-bamboo piece is about weathering something rather than about attacking. That is the single most misread element in Japanese-style tiger work.

In Chinese tradition the tiger is the king of beasts outright — the lion is a foreign import — and it drives out evil rather than embodying it. The four-character mark on a tiger forehead is read as the character for king, which is why so many stylised tigers carry a marking there that looks decorative and is not.

A tiger paired with a snake or a dragon is a balance image: two forces held against each other rather than one winning. In our own set snake and eye are the most frequent companions, and both push the design toward that older confrontational reading rather than the modern portrait one.

Where the design comes from

The tiger enters tattooing through Japanese woodblock printing — Utagawa Kuniyoshi in particular, whose 1820s warrior prints supplied the poses that irezumi still uses. When Japanese motifs reached Western shops in the twentieth century the tiger came with the fighting stance intact, which is why an American traditional tiger and a Japanese one share a silhouette while meaning slightly different things. The realistic tiger portrait is a much later arrival and belongs to the same black-and-grey portrait tradition that produced the modern lion.

Choosing yours

• Stripes are the constraint. They are high-contrast bands that need clear gaps between them, and when the gaps close the animal turns into a dark mass. A realistic tiger wants 15 cm or more; below that an artist has to start deleting stripes, which is the point where it stops looking like a tiger.
• Japanese-style tigers are drawn to wrap. They assume a curved field — outer arm, thigh, ribs — and a design built for that will look flat and stranded if placed on the chest or the flat of the back.
• Orange is the one place where colour genuinely earns its cost on this subject. About half our tiger designs are colour, a far higher share than most motifs, because black-and-grey removes the single feature people picture when they picture a tiger.

Common questions