Black and grey realism lion head with sunflowers and leaves tattooed on the side of a torso above jeans, beside the navel.

Lion and sunflower on the side of a torso

Realism · Other · Black and grey · Photo

A realistic lion head with a full mane fills the side of the torso, framed by small flowers, a large sunflower and leaves. The shading is smooth and grey, with fine detail in the fur and the lion's eyes. The photograph is sepia toned and shows the bare midriff with the navel and the top of open jeans, with a hand holding the waistband.

Realism Botanical Other Lion Sunflower Flower Leaves Mane

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

You have worked the Varnholt crossing for eleven years, long enough to tell a lorry's brakes from its engine and a lie from a nervous truth. On the grey Tuesday the sunflower seeds came through, you were the one who opened the sack, because the dog on the far lane had gone quiet, and that dog was never quiet for nothing.

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The woman at the window had a canvas holdall, a passport softened by handling, and a brass lion on a cord around her neck, its mane worn smooth on one side from being rubbed between finger and thumb. She said the seeds were for her mother's allotment in the lowlands, where nothing grew taller than a fence post. You weighed the sack in your palm. Dry, papery, the kind of seed that wants a whole summer of sun. You asked her why she carried a lion, and she said lions were the only animals that had never once asked permission to be fierce.

Protocol says you log the seeds and send her through to secondary. You log them. You do not send her anywhere. Instead you stamp her card with the date and, in the margin where nobody official looks, a small sunflower, the way your grandfather drew them on the lids of ration tins. You hand the sack back across the counter with both hands.

At closing, the lamps come on over the barrier, a ring of white that turns the whole car park the colour of old paper. Out past the wire a field of stubble catches the glare, and a few stalks someone must have dropped have already bent their heads towards the light, the way seedlings do once they have decided which way is up.