Colourful Japanese style tattoo of a green shishi lion with a grey curled mane and orange swirling background, on the outer forearm.

Green shishi lion on a forearm

Japanese · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A green shishi lion, a mythical guardian figure, with a grey curled mane and red and yellow eyes, is shown in a crouched pose. It sits against an orange background of swirling, cloud-like shapes, and the outlines are bold and dark. The bright, saturated colours stand out clearly against the dark backdrop of the photograph.

Japanese Forearm Lion Cloud Swirl

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You are halfway up the stairwell at seven in the morning, mop bucket knocking your shin, when you notice the lion has moved again. It is a plaster thing, green as pond water, with a grey mane that curls like cabbage leaves and red and yellow eyes that have been flaking since the Jubilee. Someone set it on the fourteenth-floor landing years ago, and nobody has ever owned up. Mrs Okafor says it arrived the week the scaffolding came down. Mr Dunne insists it was here before the block, which is nonsense, since the block is only thirty-one years old and so is he.

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Your job is the stairs, the bins and the lift that breaks on Tuesdays, so you have made a habit of knowing where things stand. Yesterday the lion faced the lift doors. Today it has turned its crouched body towards the corridor, paws planted on the lino as if it means to go somewhere and thinks better of it. The orange swirls painted behind it have started to look less like cloud and more like smoke, the kind that rises off a pan someone forgot.

That night you sit on the stairs with a flask and wait. At half eleven the strip light in the corridor gives its tired hum, and the door of flat 14C opens a crack. A small voice asks whether the lion is awake. You tell her it only pretends. She comes out in pink slippers, heaves the lion's head round with both arms, and sets it facing the one window on the landing that never goes dark, where an old man sits up with the television murmuring to nobody.

You leave it there. In the morning the lion still faces that window, and the lift is still broken, and the bucket is still knocking your shin. You have decided it can keep its post. Somebody on the fourteenth floor needs to know something is watching the light.