Black and grey tattoo of a lion and a second animal around a sunburst on a person's upper back, with their hair in a bun.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and sun on upper back

Back · Black and grey · Photo

The tattoo shows a lion reaching towards a second animal, which appears to be rearing or leaping, both arranged around a central sun with radiating lines. The linework is fine and sketch-like, with soft shading on the animals and fading rays around the sun. The design is in black and grey ink and sits on the right side of the upper back, with the person photographed from behind against a plain pale wall.

Back Lion Animal Sun Sunburst Ray

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

Every morning the sun came up out of the sea beyond the breakwater, and every morning the lion from the high cliffs walked down to the quay to watch it. The fishwives of Carrow Bay thought him vain. He stood with one paw lifted, as if he meant to catch the sun by its rays and pull it back down into his own hands.

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The bull who kept the salt pans did not like this. He had worked the flats since before the lighthouse was built, and he said the sun was his to rise over, since it rose over his fields first. So each dawn they met at the water's edge and shoved, horns against mane, until the moored boats rocked and the gulls went up screaming.

One winter the sun went out. Not in the sky, which stayed grey and bright as tin, but in the harbour. The old women said the lamp had drowned itself in the deep water where the lion had flung it in a rage. Nobody could fetch it back. The lion and the bull fought for three days over whose fault it was, and on the fourth morning they were too tired to fight, so they lay down together on the wet stones and waited.

Then the light came up through the water, slow as breath, rising through the green glass until it broke the surface between their two heads. Neither would touch it first. They nudged it gently towards the shingle, and when it reached the shore the fishwives swore the sun was warm enough to dry their nets.