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Kanji for Tiger
The kanji most commonly used for "Tiger" are 虎、寅.
虎
Kanji that mean Tiger
虎 is the animal, read tora. It carries the associations you would expect — ferocity, courage, danger — and appears in 猛虎 (a fierce tiger) and 白虎, the White Tiger that guards the west in the four-symbol scheme borrowed from China. Tigers are not native to Japan, and the animal arrived through Chinese learning and painting, which is why it appears on screens and temple panels rather than in local folklore.
寅 is the tiger of the zodiac, the third of the twelve branches. It is also read tora, but it means the sign rather than the beast: the year of the tiger, and formerly the pre-dawn hour of the tiger. A Japanese reader parses it as a calendar term or as part of a personal name.
Proverbially the tiger stands for boldness that shades into recklessness — 虎穴に入らずんば虎子を得ず, if you do not enter the tiger’s den you will not get its cub.
Before you use Tiger kanji
虎 is the character for the animal and is safe to wear. Use 寅 only if you mean the zodiac sign or were born in a tiger year — on its own it reads as a date or a man's name rather than as the creature.