Why is a tiger prowling through the passages of architectural discourse? Since its appearance in 1902, a tiger called Stripes continues to be associated with the Billiard Room of the Raffles Hotel in Singapore. Coalescing other non-human and animistic worlds omnipresent in Southeast Asian folkloric beliefs, the tiger’s enduring persistence in the colonial monument demands scrutiny. This paper is constructed around the ongoing stickiness of Stripes and other tigers, and the presence of animals and their anecdotes in architectural discourse. Taking up Jennifer Bloomer’s provocation to go with the swerve of the unexpected, here I adopt the tiger as an alternative figure of thought — a theoretical and poetic trope of the tropical world — to decolonise architectural history. Besides making the animal central to a disciplinary discourse that remains largely anthropocentric, the tiger is also what Donna Haraway calls a ‘material-semiotic’ figure which reveals biases, assumptions, and perceptions about the environment and the collective in which it is found. The appearance of the tiger at the Billiard Room coincided with the gradual extinction of the species on the island, several decades after tigers were actively hunted for bounty in their depleted habitats. Thus, the tiger’s anecdotal form, when placed adjacent to the colonial architectural history of the Billiard Room, is ultimately disruptive. I trace the tiger’s influence in Southeast Asia’s intertwined natural, social, and cultural histories, and discuss how this Other animalistic world swerves the imagery and perception of a colonial space whose enduring reputation rests on its significant animal Other. Through Stripes, Bloomer, Haraway, and Bruno Latour, I argue why thinking-with the tiger matters for reconsidering what matters in architectural history today. And why the animal anecdote, precisely because of the slips and swerves of its storied forms, transforms architecture’s epistemological and ethical frontiers such that it can traverse otherwise unimaginable and unexpected modes of knowing-with.