Black ink lion head framed by lace-like filigree and dreamcatcher motifs on the outer thigh, shown from two angles.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and lace ornament on a thigh

Blackwork · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

Two photographs show the same large tattoo on the outer thigh, with a lion's head at the top and an ornamental lace-style design flowing down the leg. The linework is fine and dense, with solid black areas, stippled dots and hanging chain-like details. The tattoo is entirely in black ink, with the second photo taken from a different angle against a plain background.

Blackwork Thigh Lion Lace Filigree Dreamcatcher Swirl Chain Dot

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The wind off Gullstone Bay had taken three boats in a single February, and Maud Pengelly had buried no one, so the widows came to her instead. She sat at her pillow in the window of the old net loft, the bobbins clicking like a clock, and worked the finest lace in the parish. Fishermen's wives asked her for collars and christening caps. Nobody asked her for a lion.

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The lion began as a pattern pricked into card. She drew its head at the top, a mane of curling scrolls and a mouth opened to show its teeth, and let the lace run down from it like weed off a rock. Every evening she added a row. There were circles that caught the lamplight like the rings of a dreamcatcher, and beads of thread stippled so close they looked like spray. From the lion's jaw she let a fine chain fall, the kind a sailor uses to hang a lantern, and she tied it to the iron ring by the door so the beast could not blow away.

The chapel men said she was sewing a graven image and should pray instead. Maud said the sea had been given plenty of prayers. On the night the Mary Jewel went out with the lace folded in her wheelhouse, the wind rose and tore at the loft shutters, and the chain sang against the ring. Maud sat with her hands in her lap and listened to the lion breathe through its teeth until the sky went grey.

At first light the boat came in under a sail full of holes, and every man aboard was alive. Nobody could say how the nets had held. Maud found the chain snapped at the ring and the lace gone from the wheelhouse, then saw it hanging off the bowsprit, the lion's mouth open to the harbour and its last scroll unfinished in the fog. She left that scroll as it was, as a lacemaker should, so the sea would know there was more to come.