Pencil drawing of a Japanese-style foo dog with a flowing mane and tail, standing among swirling clouds, shown as a black and grey tattoo design sketch.

Japanese foo dog with swirling clouds

Japanese · Black and grey · Flash

A pencil sketch of a Japanese-style foo dog, a mythical guardian lion with horns, a curled mane and a flame-like tail, standing on a ball with clawed paws. The linework is fine and confident, with shading that builds form on the body and dense hatching in the mane and cloud forms. The drawing is in black and grey pencil on paper, with stylised clouds and wave-like swirls filling the background around the figure.

Japanese Lion Cloud Swirl Wave Mane Ball

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion came up from the cellar in October, dragged on a tea tray by Mr Pyke, who swore a sailor had left it behind in lieu of a week's rent. Nobody at Gull Rock House wanted it. It had a face like a cat that had been argued with, horns sweeping back over its ears, and a mane carved in tight cloud-curls that caught every speck of dust. Mrs Pyke said it could stay in the hall so long as it kept its mouth shut.

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The lodgers called it the doorstop until Mrs Hartley, who had taken the attic room for the summer and a dislike to the sea, came down one morning in her wrap to complain that it had moved. I found it on the landing instead, its paw resting on the carved ball, turned to face the stairwell window. I told her the wind must have done it. She didn't believe me and left on the Friday with her trunk and her nerves.

I cleaned it that winter with vinegar and a stiff brush, working the verdigris out of the flame-tail and the waves cut into the plinth, where the salt had collected in the hollows like frost. Under the grime the bronze was warm gold. When the gales came in January and took the slates off the harbour wall, the lion stood in the hall with its teeth bared at the door, and the glass in the front window never cracked.

Mr Pyke called it superstition and went out to mend the shed. In March a man in a good coat came asking after a brass dog that had gone missing from a ship's cabin, and I told him we only had a doorstop. He looked past me at the hall, touched his hat, and walked back down to the harbour without it. That evening I carried the lion to the window so it could watch the water, and I have never let anyone turn it round since.