Geometric lion head tattoo in brown, tan and grey tones on the thigh of a person wearing denim shorts.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric lion head on a thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Colour · Photo

A lion's head facing forward is built from angular, faceted shapes that form the mane and face. The shading uses flat blocks of brown, tan and grey with soft gradients, and the piece sits on a thigh against a plain yellow background. The composition is centred on the thigh, with rolled denim shorts visible at the top of the frame.

Geometric Thigh Lion Lion head Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You reach the orchard gate at six, when the late August light lies flat along the rows and the windfalls have started to sour in the long grass. Your uncle Ivo is already at the press, swearing at the rusted ratchet, and he doesn't look up when you come in. "Mind the wasps," he says. "They know it's the last good week."

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The press stands under the walnut tree where it has stood since before your mother was born. Its crossbeam is a single length of old pear wood, and somebody long ago cut a lion into the end of it, a head built from sharp planes instead of curves: a wedge of brow, a mane of stepped blades, eyes that are only two chamfered notches. Nobody in the family agrees on who made it. Ivo says a travelling joiner who trusted nothing but his set square. Your grandmother said it was the gardener's boy who went to the war and never came home.

You fill the first crate with Discovery and Bramley, and the sweet sharp smell rises like heat off a road. Ivo sets the cloth, you turn the screw, and the juice runs amber into the trough. Halfway through, the afternoon sun slants through the leaves and strikes the lion's mane, throwing its tan and grey facets across the wood, and for a moment every blade seems to shift the way a real animal's coat does when it shakes off the flies.

When the pressing is done, Ivo hands you the first cup and tells you to take it to the lion. You don't argue. You pour a splash onto the pear wood where the grain has darkened, and it pools in the carved notches of the eyes and goes still. "There," Ivo says, wiping his hands. "Now it's been fed for another year."