Vivid neo-trad lion head tattoo in orange, red, yellow and blue with bold black outlines, on the outer thigh.

Colourful lion head on a thigh

Neo-trad · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A stylised lion head faces forward, framed by a flowing mane of flame-like shapes. The bold black outlines define the features and mane, with fine hatching around the face. Orange, red, yellow, pink and blue fills blend across the design, which sits on a smooth, lightly toned limb against a black background.

Neo-trad Thigh Lion Lion head Mane Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion came ashore in my second winter at Scarrow Point, lashed to a broken spar with a length of rope still bearing a Cardiff chandler's tag. Nobody on the headland would say whose ship she had been. Old Tobias Renn wanted her chopped up for kindling, but I asked him to let me keep her head, and he shrugged, because a man who has kept a lamp burning for thirty years does not argue with a girl who has just dragged a carved lion up forty steps on her back.

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I scraped the salt from her with a knife and painted her with whatever the boathouse could spare: ochre, red lead, and a tin of blue meant for the lamp room door. I did the mane in long tongues, flames really, because the wind up there never lets anything lie flat, and I wanted her to look as though she was running straight into it. Tobias said she looked like a fire that had lost its way. I told him that was the point of her.

The night the Morwenna Belle went onto the Teeth, the clockwork seized halfway through its turn and the great lens sat dark. I climbed to the gallery with a can of paraffin and a box of matches, and I lit the wick by hand while the wind tried to pull the cap off my head. The lion was bolted to the rail below me, her brass eyes catching the flame and throwing it back out over the water. Two men came in on the rocks that night and four did not, and I have never decided whether the light saved the two or only let them see what they were dying of.

In the morning the sea had gone the colour of pewter and the mane was wet and bright in the first sun. Tobias came up the steps slowly, out of breath, and laid his palm against the painted blue at the lion's brow. He didn't say anything. I didn't either. We left the blue where it was.