Sketchy, watercolour-style lion wearing a crown with a crescent moon, in pink, teal and blue on the thigh.

Crowned lion on a thigh

Upper arm · Mixed · Photo

A lion with a flowing mane and a crescent moon on its forehead wears an ornate crown with beaded edges and a teal leaf motif. Fine black linework outlines the features and mane, with loose washes of pink, teal and blue added in a sketchy, painterly way. The design fills the upper thigh, with the crown at the top and the lion's face centred below it.

Upper arm Lion Crown Crescent moon Mane Whiskers Leaf

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion came down from the palace roof on the night the bells stopped, and nobody in Harrowmere could agree afterwards whether the crown had been on his head or only floating above it like a lamp. Old Tamsin swore it was pinned there by a crescent of green light, the same colour as the moon that hung over the salt marsh that week. She had been out after the eels with her brother's lantern when the great beast padded past the sea wall, mane lifting in the wind like wet rushes.

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He did not roar. He stopped at the water's edge and looked at the town the way a steward looks at a ledger he has been asked to balance, slowly, finding every debt. The crown had a leaf of jade set at its crest, and when the tide turned the leaf caught the light and dropped a little green flame onto the mud. Tamsin said he bent and touched it with his nose, as if testing whether it was still warm.

The king had sold the crown to the harbour master two winters earlier, and the harbour master had melted the gold for ships' fittings and kept the jewels. Nobody had asked the lion's opinion. In the morning the wall was whole, the bells rang, and the harbour master's accounts were found sitting neatly on the church step, every figure corrected in a hand no one in Harrowmere had seen before.