Black and grey lion tattoo on the upper arm, split between a geometric faceted left side and a realistic shaded right side within large triangles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric and realistic lion on upper arm

Geometric · Upper arm · Black and grey · Photo

A large lion head sits inside two overlapping triangles on the upper arm. The left half is built from bold black geometric facets, while the right half is rendered realistically with fine shading and a mane of stippled dots. The image is black and grey and shows the arm against a plain pale background.

Geometric Dotwork Realism Upper arm Lion Mane Triangle Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The tide had swallowed the causeway by the time I reached the survey post on Inchmurrin, so I sat on the upturned fish crate beside Mairi's theodolite and waited for the water to show me the way back. She had left everything the way she always did: the tripod square to the north star, a pencil stub tied to one leg with string, and a sheet of graph paper pinned flat under a stone.

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On the paper she had drawn two triangles, one overlapping the other, and inside them a lion's head split down the middle. The left side was all hard facets, angles that met like cut glass. The right side she had shaded so finely it looked like breath on a window, the mane falling in soft dark strokes. Beneath it, in her cramped hand, she had written: Measure the half you can see. Draw the half you remember.

I did not understand it until the tide turned and I began to walk. She had spent twenty years mapping this coast for the Admiralty and had come to believe every shoreline was really two lines, the one the sea agreed to and the one it kept back. The lion was her way of saying so. Angles for what could be fixed, shading for what could only be recalled.

At the cottage the kettle was cold and a second sheet lay beneath the first. In the margin beside the lion's open eye she had scratched a single bearing, 214 degrees, and under it: the light, if you stand where I did. I carried that bearing out across the flats in the last of the day, and the lighthouse sat exactly where the two halves of the lion met.