Black and grey geometric tattoo of a lion head merged with a woman's face, with a mane above and dotted shading, on the thigh.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Lion and woman face on a thigh

Geometric · Thigh · Black and grey · Photo

A woman's face is set within a lion's head, with the lion's mane rising above and angular facial planes drawn in bold, sketchy linework. Shading is built from dense dotwork and hatching, with jagged geometric shards extending down into the neck and shoulder area. The tattoo is in black ink and grey tones and fills most of the frame on the outer thigh.

Geometric Dotwork Thigh Lion Woman Face Mane Geometric shape

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The lion came off the boat in pieces, the way everything did on Haldey. My uncle Tam had bought a crate of salvage from a freighter that broke up on the Skerry, and inside it, wrapped in tarpaulin, was a carved head with a mane like a burst of sea spray and eyes set deep as cups. Nobody on the island would say what it was for. Mrs Corrie said it was a guardian. The minister said it was a poor idea to keep it in the kirk porch.

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I took it home to the cottage above the harbour because I could not stand the way it watched the shore. Each night I sat with a pencil and drew it, the planes of its face cut into angles by the wind off the water, until my page looked less like a lion and more like a cracked window. Somewhere in the drawing a woman's face surfaced, looking out through the brow as if she had been waiting behind it. I rubbed her out twice. She came back both times, her hair lifting in strands like kelp.

In March the ferry did not run for nine days. Shards of the freighter washed up along the shingle, grey triangles of steel and glass, and I gathered them in a bucket because I liked the sound they made. My neighbour, a widow called Ishbel Ross, came to the door with a loaf and stayed to look at my drawings. She put her finger on the woman's throat and said, 'She's not keeping the lion. The lion's keeping her.' I told her she was talking nonsense. She laughed and said the island had heard worse.

When the ferry came back I carried the carved head down to the slipway and set it facing the open water. The tide took the sharpest of the shards out with it, and I kept the rest for the drawing. Some mornings I still find a splinter of grey steel on my windowsill, and I leave it there.