In a lovely manor house in West Sussex, living with her parents and grandparents, exists a girl named Tiger. Tiger is autistic and thinks differently to everyone else and didn't in fact speak until she was seven, but she is a talented painter and adores tigers (and in fact all animals). Although the manor house is her entire world, her imagination opens everything up so she can even believe she can see the Taj Mahal from her attic bedroom window. Her parents love her – even though they wish she might draw on paper rather than the walls! – but even so, Tiger spends a lot of her days alone in the house and in the garden. And it's there where Tiger's world will change forever...

One night, she paints a raggedy-looking tiger onto an old red brick garden wall. Under the blue moon, the tiger comes shockingly to life. Immediately bonded, Tiger knows in her soul she has found her first friend and willingly abandons her normal life for an adventure of the wild kind!