Tiger Art: a curated collection

More than 50 pieces from museums around the world, via Google Arts and Culture. Centering artists from Southeast Asia, South Asia and East Asia. Btw, July 29 is International Tiger Day

A Tale for the Year of the Tiger: Guardians of the Gingko Forest

The legend of a 3rd century doctor/social entrepreneur and a team of tigers :-)

A Tale for the Year of the Tiger: The Stripe Siblings

A folktale about tigers defending and supporting their healthcare provider during a time of crisis.

Cheetah Weeping

Inspired by the Zulu folktale concerning the origin of the black lines running down a cheetah's face from its eyes. These lines were the tear tracks of a mother cheetah weeping for her lost cubs. The young cheetahs had been stolen by a hunter who wanted to train them to hunt for him.

When the mother's grief came to the attention of an old man from the hunter's village, he informed the village elders of the hunter’s conduct. The villagers expelled the hunter. The old man returned the cheetah cubs to their mother, reuniting the family. But the tear tracks remained on the cheetah’s face as a reminder to hunters not to do wrong again.

The moral condemnation for keeping hunting cheetahs is certainly not universal. Listed here are a few (not all) of the peoples that had tamed cheetahs for hunting:

Jaguar Dreaming

I've decided that my tiger needed some company. :-) This is the 2nd piece in the Wild Cat Portrait series.

Jaguars in the mythology of the Americas:

• One of the aspects of the Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca is a jaguar who destroyed the world.
• The Mayans' many jaguar deities
• Priests of Chavin temple in Peru were depicted as able to shapeshift into jaguars (Paul Richard Steele, Handbook of Inca Mythology, p162)
• A Yanomamo Jaguar Myth

Get this jaguar as:

• 8.5"x11" (approx.) print (on storenvy.com)
• Masks, stickers, and more awesome products on redbubble.com)

Tiger Tears

Inspired by a weird dream in which I saw a tiger bawling.

To answer the question of why he was crying, here's the dream's story :-)

Three friends - a tiger, a human and a donkey were crossing a desert. By the dress and looks of the human, the setting was probably somewhere in South Asia, maybe the Indian state of Rajasthan, which does have a tiger preserve, btw.