Geometric lion head with vertical arrow

Geometric · Black and grey · Photo

A geometric lion head in profile is drawn with bold angular outlines and fills its facets with stippled dotwork. A thin vertical line with an arrowhead at the bottom runs along the left side of the lion. The design is in black ink only, shown against pale skin on a plain background.

Geometric Dotwork Lion Lion head Mane Arrow

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit nearer the fire, the wind up here takes the good bits. You want to know why the surveyors stopped coming over Carrow Gap? My grandmother had it from a chainman named Tomas Hebb, who carried the measuring rope for them one summer when the valley still had a name nobody says now. They hung a brass plumb line from the col, a thin rod with an arrowhead for a weight, and let it fall down the face to find the true drop. Every morning it hung plumb. Every evening, when the men wrote their figures, the lion on the ridge had turned his head a finger's width further east.

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The lion was no beast anyone had carved. He was slate, split and faceted by the frost into planes so sharp a man could cut his thumb on the mane, and where the weather had pocked the stone there were hollows like pricked dots, thousands of them, as if someone had gone over him with a needle. Tomas said the lion was looking for something. The surveyors laughed at him. They wanted their line straight and their sums tidy, and they had no interest in the way the stone's jaw kept closing on the valley road.

On the last day Tomas took the plumb line down himself, meaning to check it against the lion's gaze. The arrowhead swung and settled pointing straight at a farmhouse in the low fields, the one where his sister had gone to marry and never written back. He stood there longer than the sums allowed. Then he coiled the line, left the figures blank, and walked down the far side of the gap without a word to the men, who found the map unfinished when they came looking in the autumn.

The plumb line is still there, if you climb up in the grey hour. It hangs from the cliff's brow and the point never quite touches the grass, and the lion, with his stippled cheek and his mouth set against the road, keeps looking east as though he is waiting for someone to come back up the path and read the measure.