Teal and grey geometric line-work illustration of a lion's head facing forward, with a dense mane and yellow eyes, on a white background.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Geometric teal lion head design

Geometric · Colour · Flash

A forward-facing lion head with a full, flowing mane, drawn in a stylised, symmetrical design. The face and mane are filled with fine hatched and patterned linework in varying shades of teal, blue and grey, with yellow highlights in the eyes and a few strands of the mane. The subject is centred on a plain white background with no body or skin visible.

Geometric Lion Mane Lion head Animal

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Sit down, the lot of you, and mind the crisp packet. No, not that one, the one with the sticky bottom. Right. You all know the lift in Ashcombe House has been broken since the winter they painted the stairwell. What you don't know is who painted the lion on the back wall of the ninth landing, or why it was the colour of a swimming pool on a wet day.

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Her name was Ruth Okonedo, and she was the only one on the estate who still climbed the stairs with a shopping bag in each hand. Every evening she stopped on the ninth floor to catch her breath, and every evening the lion watched her. Its eyes were two lamps the council had never replaced, yellow as old teeth, and when the wind came up the stairwell its mane lifted and settled, lifted and settled, as though it were breathing through the bricks.

One November the water tank on the roof ran dry and the whole block sent up a grumble. Ruth went up with a bucket and came back down with nothing but a wet sleeve. She said the lion had come off the wall, shaken its mane out over the tank, and gone back to its place before the caretaker could see. Nobody believed her, except the boy from flat forty, who had noticed the plaster was damp in the shape of paw prints.

So if you hear scratching on the stairs tonight, do not open the door. It is only the lion counting the floors, tracing each step with a claw the way the painter once traced every hair of its mane, one fine line at a time. And when it reaches the top it will look down at you with those yellow eyes and say nothing at all, because it has already done the thing it came to do.