Black and grey geometric lion face inside a mandala tattoo on the outer forearm, with a blurred background and denim shorts visible.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric lion within a mandala on a forearm

Geometric · Forearm · Black and grey · Photo

A faceted lion's face sits at the centre of a circular mandala design on the forearm. The lion is drawn with angular geometric lines and soft grey shading, while the surrounding mandala has layered petal and scroll patterns with fine detail. The image is shot close up with a blurred indoor background and a person wearing denim shorts at the right edge.

Geometric Forearm Lion Mandala Geometric pattern

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lamp-room at Brackwell Drift smelt of paraffin and wet wool, and you were the only one left to trim the wicks when the night shift came up grey-faced at six. Your father's brass check tag lay on the bench beside his cold pipe, its number stamped crooked, and under the number someone long dead had scratched a lion's head inside a ring of petals. Everyone called it the lion. You called it the map, because the lines of its mane ran at the same angles as the seam plans pinned by the office door.

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That Thursday the cage stuck at the ninety-fathom landing and the whistle sounded twice, then nothing. Mrs Pryce from the pithead cottages came down the yard with a flask and stood in the cold saying nothing at all. You went back to the lamp-room and turned the tag in your palm, so the swinging bulb broke along the cut facets of the lion's face. The triangles across its brow were not random. They pointed down the gallery, left, then left again, to the old cross-cut the men said had never been properly timbered.

You took a shovel and the tag and went after them, counting props with your fingers while the rock sang the way it does before a fall. Nobody had told you to go. You simply followed where the lion's nose pointed, and found the men behind a heap of stone, tapping steel on rail, alive and swearing and asking who had been fool enough to come alone.

When they reached the surface at dawn you were the one holding the lamp. The lion caught the light and held it, gold at the eyes, and the check tag went back on its nail in the lamp-room, pointing the right way.