Ipepo.

Ipepo means "wings" in Guaraní. He is a wild jaguar of the Brazilian Pantanal, and of the 22 individual jaguars we saw across six days of boat drives, he was the one I couldn't stop thinking about. Something about him stood out. He was beautiful, calm, impossibly photogenic, and somehow he felt familiar, as though I already knew him before I'd ever raised my camera.

The jaguar has always been my spirit animal. I was drawn to big cats from a young age, long before I understood why. On a group meditation weekend, in a trance state, the animal that came to me was, without hesitation, a jaguar. So when I sat down in 2020 to make one of my very first coloured pencil pieces, the subject chose itself. I drew a jaguar from a reference I found online, never having seen one in the wild.

Years later I travelled to the Pantanal with my wife, an award-winning wildlife filmmaker known as Roxy the Zoologist, who leads small-group wildlife photography tours there. It was my first time in Brazil. For a week we lived on the river, heading out by boat each day among caiman, capybara and birds, watching for the cats that make the Pantanal the best place on earth to see wild jaguars.

Then, on one of those boat drives, I spotted a jaguar on the bank. It was Ipepo, a male Roxy had photographed before and grown fond of. To find him, and to recognise him, felt like the whole trip had been quietly building to that one moment. I had drawn a jaguar before I'd ever seen one, and now here I was, face to face with this particular wild individual, in the place my wife knows best.

I decided to draw him. A jaguar's rosettes are like a human fingerprint, no two individuals share the same pattern, and the markings are how researchers tell one cat from another. Getting them right was the heart of the work: every spot placed exactly where it sits on the real animal, so that this is unmistakably Ipepo and no other jaguar. The portrait took me around forty hours.

Where the first jaguar was drawn alone, from a borrowed image, Ipepo was drawn from a moment I lived: a real animal, in a real place, found on a journey I shared with the person who brought me into that world. Wings, fittingly, for a piece about how far the work has carried me.