No Two Stripes Are the Same
A tiger's stripes are not just surface markings. They are set in the skin itself, the underlying pigmentation follows the same pattern as the fur above it, which means shaving a tiger would reveal the same design. Each animal's arrangement of stripes is unique: the spacing, the branching, the gaps, the slight asymmetry between left flank and right. Biologists treat this the way forensic labs treat fingerprints. The Wildlife Institute of India, which anchors much of the country's big cat research, uses this principle as the foundation of its individual identification work. A tiger photographed at Corbett and a tiger photographed at Bandhavgarh can be confirmed as different animals, or the same animal, purely from flank images.
