Someone asked if I had a pic of a tiger underside, specifically regarding the stripes on the underside, so I searched for a good reference pic, and this is one of them I found.

This is another one of Genesis, a Bengal Tiger, doing the underside-solar-panel-alignment-towards-the-sun thing that most cats are known for.

As you can see here from Genesis' fur coat, the stripes don't stop with the orange; they continue right on around and meet in the middle. :) The ones on the very front of the chest fade to grey and are hard to see, much like the ones that can be seen in this pic on his lower abdomen.

Here's some more tiger trivia for you:

A) every tiger, even siblings of the same litter, have different stripe patterns. They are all unique, and are the equivalent of our fingerprints. That's also true of the spotted cats; all of them have different patterns.

B) the stripe "width" varies from sub-species to sub-species. If you look at Genesis' stripes here, they look wide until you notice that they're really two narrow stripes that run together, and even sway away from one another, which you can see pretty clearly in three places on the right side of his chest. As a general rule, Sumatrans have the broadest width of stripes, and the Siberians the most narrow, which are also in "pairs" like the Bengals. There are, of course, always exceptions to the rule. :)

C) All tigers have a grand lot of color-variant, even within sub-species. Another general rule: Sumatrans have the most rich and dark color of orange, almost like a low-burning fire, to the Siberians which can almost look tan because the orange looks so "faded". There is also quite a variant during the seasons of the year. For example, a Siberian Tiger's coat may be a very faded orange in the winter months, but be a much darker orange during the summer. This is generally believed as Nature's way of helping the tiger blend more suitably into it's environment for better stealth-mode operations.

D) There is a large spectrum of size and weight differential in the tiger sub-species. The Sumatrans are the smallest, with males weighing on average of 350-400lbs (159-182kg), with the Siberians being the giants of the cat family, with males having been recorded at over 800lbs (364kg), with some in captivity approaching half-a-ton (455kg). Bengals, like Genesis, are the medium-sized ones of the tiger sub-species, being just about the center between the two.

So hopefully, this pic of Genesis will be another useful reference for those artists out there who might dare to capture a tiger in one of the more amusing of the relaxing stances: upsidedown. :)

This picture was taken 15-Aug-03. The image was taken with a Canon EOS 10D and the EF 28-200mm f/3.5-5.6 USM lens. The original was taken at full frame of 3072x2048x24b, ISO eqv 400, 1/500 shutter, f/4.5. This image was shrunken down and cropped for space conservation.

Disclaimer: I hate to have to put this on here, but the pic is copyright me. Please do not distribute, copy, alter, etc, without my permission. Having said all that, feel free to download and use it for your own inspiration.