Flash sheet of four black line-art geometric animal heads, a stag, a dragon, a wolf and a lion, each with a name and short motto beneath.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Four geometric animal sigils on a flash sheet

Geometric · Black and grey · Flash

The sheet shows four geometric line drawings of animal heads: a stag with wide antlers, a dragon, a snarling wolf and a lion. Each design has a name and a short motto set in capitals beneath it. The linework is bold, angular and uniform in black on a white background, with no shading or colour.

Geometric Stag Dragon Wolf Lion Antler Animal head

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit closer to the hearth, for the fire will only last the length of one more log, and the wind won't wait for us. You want to know why the four painted boards hang over the door of the Crooked Hart? Then hush and listen, because my grandmother told it to me in this same room, with the same snow hissing past the shutters.

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The boards show a stag with antlers split like frozen branches, a dragon's narrow skull, a wolf with its jaw wide open, and a lion drawn in six hard angles. Four cousins came up the pass that winter, each from a different valley, each sure the road belonged to his own blood. Maud Tallow kept the inn then, and she had one loaf, one barrel and a single pot of broth. She bolted the door and told them the snow had made its decision.

So they argued on the step until the stag's cousin stood up and said he could hear the drift setting hard against the wall. The wolf's sister counted the rafters aloud, as if numbers might warm her. The dragon's man offered Maud a purse of gold that she could not eat. The youngest, the lion's boy, said nothing. He drew a sum on the wall with a bit of charcoal: four cups, one loaf, one barrel, and the long night ahead. Maud looked at it for a long while. Then she unbolted the door and cut the loaf into four pieces, uneven by weight, and she gave the largest to the boy.

In the morning the thaw had not come, but the road had been cleared by the four of them working together. Before they left, each one carved his sigil into the lintel beside the door, the lines sharp and square. Maud never painted over them. She said a house that will share its bread should be remembered in wood, not in wine-stained paint.