Tiger Coloring Pages

A tiger is the biggest cat alive, and one of the few that likes water. These tiger coloring pages follow it everywhere it goes: through bamboo and tall grass, into rivers and pools, up trees and over boulders, and into the snow.

The portraits come first: a tiger's face looking straight out of the page, a head in profile with its long whiskers, a tiger standing side on so every stripe from spine to belly shows, and one walking straight toward you. Then the tiger at work: prowling a river bank of cracked mud, wading a shallow river, swimming with only its head and back above the ripples, drinking at a forest pool, crouched in tall grass, scratching claw marks into a tree, leaping up a pile of boulders and crossing a rope bridge over a gorge. It rests, too, asleep on a flat rock, yawning on a ledge at sunrise, stretched along a jungle branch and lying among the hanging roots of a banyan tree.

The cubs have their own pages: a round-faced cub sitting up, a tumble of cubs wrestling in a pool, two cubs batting at a vine, one pouncing on a fallen fruit, and one on a low branch for the first time while its mother watches from below. A tigress carries a cub in her mouth down a forest track and washes another under the bamboo. The places change with the tiger: a Siberian tiger on a snowy rock among pines, another in falling snow between birches, a Bengal tiger at a mangrove creek, a tiger above a waterfall, one walking past an old temple wall and one facing a peacock in a clearing. For patient colorists there is a tiger mandala of heads around a ring of paw prints, and a tiger face framed by lotus flowers.

No two tigers wear the same stripes

Every tiger's stripes are its own, as individual as a fingerprint, and the pattern on its left side does not match the one on its right. Researchers who count wild tigers use exactly this: cameras hidden along forest tracks photograph each animal that passes, and the stripes tell them who it was. The stripes are not only in the fur either. They are in the skin underneath, so a shaved tiger would still be striped.

That makes a small game for two children coloring the same page: the lines are identical, but each of them can add one extra stripe somewhere, and then the two tigers are different animals.

Orange, black, and the white parts people forget

On these pages the stripes are already drawn in solid black, so the coloring is everything between them. The coat is orange, deep on the back and paler down the sides. Then leave the white parts white, because they are what make a tiger look like a tiger and not an orange cat with lines: the chin and the fur around the mouth, the belly, the inside of the legs, a patch over each eye. On the back of each ear there is a white spot ringed in black. It is thought to help cubs follow their mother through tall grass, and some people call it a false eye.

Why orange, in a green forest? Because the deer a tiger hunts cannot see it. Deer see color the way a person with red-green color blindness does, and to them the orange coat reads as green, blending into the grass, while the black stripes break up its outline. A tiger is camouflaged for the animals that matter, not for us.

The Siberian tiger, also called the Amur tiger, is the largest, with a thicker and paler coat for the cold, so color it a lighter, sandier orange than the Bengal tiger at the creek. A white tiger is not a separate kind: it is a Bengal tiger born with a rare gene that removes the orange. Any of these pages can become a white tiger by leaving the coat uncolored and giving the eyes a clear blue.

Pages for younger children and for patient ones

Most of this collection is quick to color. A single tiger on plain or open ground, with its stripes already in place, leaves a few large orange areas to fill, which is a good first page for a child of four or five. Quick to color, above the grid, opens on:

• Tiger portrait facing forward
• Tiger swimming
• Two tigers greeting head to head

The dense pages are the jungle ones, where bamboo canes, banyan roots, leaves and temple stones fill every corner around the animal. They suit an older child or an adult who wants a long evening with one page. Lots of detail begins with:

• Tiger face in a lotus frame
• Tiger walking past a temple wall
• Tiger in a bamboo grove

Tigers for a school team, a zodiac year and Tiger Day

The tiger is one of the most common mascots in schools and sports teams, which gives these pages an easy job: color the tiger in the school's own colors for a spirit week or a game day. Purple and gold, blue and white, anything goes. The portrait facing forward and the lotus frame work best, because the face is the whole page.

The tiger is also one of the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, and children born in a Year of the Tiger like having a page of their own sign. And every July 29 is International Tiger Day, when schools and zoos talk about the wild tigers that are left. It is a good day to print the Siberian and the Bengal tigers side by side and look at where each one lives.

A jungle frieze for a wall

The tigers that walk, prowl and wade are drawn side on or head on, so they line up well. Color several, cut them out, and stick them in a row along a long strip of green paper with cut-out grass along the bottom: a tiger walking the length of a bedroom wall or a classroom corridor. The cubs and the tigress fit at one end as a family.

Printing the tigers

The PDFs are A4 at 300 dpi. On A4, print at 100 %; on US Letter, choose "fit to page", which shrinks the drawing by around six percent and keeps it whole. The printing guide shows where the option sits. Add to pack under several pages prints them together in one file. The other big cats are in the lion coloring pages, the zoo coloring pages gather tigers with elephants and giraffes, and the cat coloring pages are the small cousins at home.