✨ A short story.✨
One moment, the world was quiet.
But something inside her stirred.
A growl rose up from the belly of her knowing.
A flicker of fire moved behind her ribs.
And a whisper, velvet and ancient, said:
“It’s time.”
So she laid her skin bare
and offered her left arm—
the arm of the womb,
the moon,
the remembering.
And onto her flesh
was carved a tiger,
not leaping,
not snarling,
but climbing downward.
Not a predator—
a guide.
A totem for the descent.
A guardian of the dark.
Because there are places in a woman
no one can go with her.
Not lovers.
Not friends.
Not even the ancestors
until she calls them.
But the tiger…
the tiger never left her side.
She walked with her
into the underworld—
into the ache behind the armor,
into the silence that screamed at night,
into the shame she had inherited like scripture
from women who had been told to shrink.
And when the path narrowed,
when the old stories came clawing back,
when the light dimmed and she thought,
“I can’t do this,”
the tiger turned her head and said:
“Then I will walk ahead.”
“I will bare my teeth at every lie.”
“I will slash the veils they wrapped you in.”
“I will growl until you remember who the hell you are.”
So she kept walking.
She wept in the dirt.
She remembered the names of her power.
She howled for every time she was told to hush.
She touched the bones of every woman
she’d been forced to bury inside herself.
And when she rose—
she did not wipe the blood off.
She rose crowned in it.
She rose with fire behind her eyes
and a tiger stitched into her skin
as witness.
As protector.
As proof that she went to the bottom of herself—
and lived.
That was the day the girl became
a woman of prophecy—
a healer,
a wild rememberer,
a feminine warrior
with a sacred roar.
Now, when she lifts her left arm
to bless,
to protect,
to heal,
to call someone home—
the tiger rises too.
Because she did not just survive the descent.
She owned it.
She reclaimed it.
And she returned
not empty,
but whole.