Fine black line tattoo of a lion built from overlapping circles, sitting on the left side of the ribs.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric lion made of overlapping circles on ribs

Fine line · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A lion in side profile walks across the skin, drawn as an outline built from many overlapping circles of varying sizes. The linework is very fine and dark, with small dots and short strokes adding detail to the mane and legs. The tattoo is in black ink only and sits centred on a pale area of skin, with dark fabric visible at the top left of the frame.

Fine line Geometric Ribs Lion Circle Animal Outline Geometric shape Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Ada had been told that a compass point, once set, should never be lifted from the paper, and so for three winters she had drawn nothing but circles. Her father, who made instruments for surveyors in a workshop off Digbeth, kept a drawer of spoiled sheets as evidence of her patience. The brass dividers had worn a pale groove into the first joint of her thumb.

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The commission came in March from a shipping agent in Liverpool who wanted a lion for the flyleaf of a navigation almanac. "Not a lion that roars," the letter said, "a lion that knows where it is." Ada took the job to pay for coal. She set the compass at the width of a lamp chimney and began at the shoulder, swinging each ring so it cut the last one, until the beast rose out of overlapping rings like heat off a road.

Her father checked it at the bench with a loupe. He counted the circles along the flank, nodded at the tail, and then said the legs were too close together. "A lion walks with a gap," he said. "Otherwise it's just a wheel with ambitions." She did not argue. She spent the night at the dots instead, placing each one where two rings met, and by dawn the mane had gone dark with them.

The almanac went to sea in May. Ada never saw the ship. What she kept was a letter from a mate, months later, saying the flyleaf had been pinned above the chart table and that in a gale the lion had seemed to lean into the wind. Her father read it twice, folded it into the drawer with the spoiled sheets, and said nothing about legs.