The design problem was the niche: I wanted the Goddess framed in a cusped temple arch the way a shrine idol sits in its alcove, but still riding her tiger rather than standing apart from it. So the tiger strides across the lower centre, body flat madder red banded with iron-black stripes, and the six-armed Mother rises out of its back inside the arch with trident, sword, lotus and kalash held in a clean fan. The tiger is the vahana of the fierce protective Mother-forms — Vihat and the warrior Matas of Gujarat — so the striped beast is not decoration but identification. Banded panel rows above and below keep the devotees, drummers and a small canopied shrine where the eye can read them in order, and the whole thing stays inside a quiet beaded-dot border, because the Vaghri painters of Ahmedabad built these cloths as portable shrines and the restraint is the point: madder red, iron-black, cream, nothing more.