Black and grey lion face with ornate mandala-style petals behind it, tattooed on the side of a ribcage.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and mandala on the ribs

Dotwork · Ribs · Black and grey · Photo

A lion's face is centred within a symmetrical mandala of lotus-like petals, with ornate patterns across the forehead and cheeks. The shading uses fine lines and stippled dots for the mane, with tassel-like drops hanging from the chin. The image is entirely black and grey, shot close on the side of the torso with a soft, pale background.

Dotwork Geometric Ribs Lion Mandala Lotus Tassel Mane Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The reunion was held in the village hall, where paper lanterns swung on wire and the trestle tables smelled of floor polish. Forty-one of them sat down that night, and by the second cup of tea they were arguing about the lion. It had hung above the infants' door for as long as anyone could remember, a cast-iron face ringed with lotus petals, its mane curling into tassels that caught the dust. When the school was pulled down it had vanished, and nobody who had been in the fourth form would admit to taking it.

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Mrs Ferrier, who had taught them all to read, stood up with the teapot and said that a lion looked at every morning for sixty years did not simply walk off. Tom Ashby said he had buried it under the old lotus tree by the wall after a dare, so they put on their coats and went out into the wet car park with a borrowed spade. They dug until the rain filled the hole. They found only a paper bag of sherbet dabs gone to paste and a hairclip nobody claimed.

Back inside, Mrs Ferrier turned the pot upside down over a saucer, and a folded paper lion slid out from under the lid. Its petals had been drawn in biro, and inside it was a list in the careful hand of Ruth Pell, who had died in Leeds the year before. Beside each name she had written one thing she meant to say to that person if they ever came back to the hall.

Nobody spoke for a while. Then Tom Ashby read out his own name, went red to the ears, and began. The lanterns swung, the rain kept on at the windows, and the hall filled with forty-one people saying sorry to a sheet of paper.